


51% Problem Child

by Tierfal



Series: To the Wolves [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, American Football, Crack, F/F, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Humor, M/M, School Dances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The homecoming dance follows right on the heels of the first football game, which will make it easy for Roy to remember the date of his own destruction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Louder Than Sirens

**Author's Note:**

> Fittingly enough, [the first part of this fic](http://tierfallen.livejournal.com/147940.html) had a number of truly wonderful cheerleaders who gave me some incomparably great ideas and brainstorming assistance. You guys know who you are, and hopefully you know how much I appreciate it. :3 ♥♥♥
> 
> I would like to make a formal apology for the fact that this cliffhanger is actually _worse_ than the last one – and I'd promise that the next part won't take almost _two years_ to produce, but I always end up a liar when I do that. XD I'm also veryveryvery sorry for the fact that only the first few pieces are coming out today – the later parts need a bit more editing, and I won't have time for that until next weekend. :c
> 
> The chapter titles are from [Florence](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boo2Zm69fhY), 'cause I needed some musical accompaniment to slog through the end of this ridiculous thing. X'D

Alfons is leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his chin cradled in his hands, gazing out at the football field and looking kind of disconcerted.  He glances over at Al.  “Are you okay with the fact that the entire school is staring at your brother’s butt?”

“No,” Al says truthfully.  “But my choices are to put up with it or to gouge out the eyes of every person here, and that would take a _really_ long time.”

Alfons chews on his bottom lip slowly.  He’s wearing a pair of navy blue knit gloves—he was saying earlier that he cut the fingers off of them himself to make it easier to operate his telescope.

“I’d help you,” he says.

“Thanks,” Al says.

The bleachers are really cold.  He scoots a little closer.

“Is Mr. Hughes actually going to sit with us?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” Alfons says, hunching his shoulders.  He looks like a bird fluffing up his feathers—it’s really adorable, and Al will never, ever tell him so.  “Maybe after the game starts, and Ed sits down, he’ll realize there’s nothing to take pictures of until halftime.”

“Don’t cheerleaders have to celebrate touchdowns?” Al asks.  They never went to football games at their old school; Winry dated one of the linebackers the summer before they started, and he was _evil_ , so they boycotted the team in every way they could.

“Oh,” Alfons says.  “I guess so.”  He glances over at Mrs. Hughes, who is quite contentedly focused on preventing Elysia from spilling apple juice all down her little pink parka.  “It’s funny,” Alfons says, nodding down at the man who has flung himself halfway over the railing of the bottom row, the better to document the way a dozen female cheerleaders pale almost to invisibility around Ed’s pinwheeling grace.  They can see the camera flash from here.  “Normally he’s only like this with Elysia or on holidays.”

Alfons pauses another moment, and then he turns to Al, and it’s only a half-smile, but it’s the warmest and most genuine one that Al has seen on his face since they arrived.

“I guess you guys are definitely part of the family,” Alfons says.

Al’s heart swells until he thinks he’s going to choke.

  


* * *

  


It’s fine.  It’s going to be fine.  Everybody has—preferences, and everybody has a couple moments where they go off the deep end and totally lose their shit, but most people climb back out of the pool afterward and dry off and get on with their lives.

Oh, God, Roy’s drowning.  He’s fucked.  He’s so fucked.  He’s so fucked there has to be a stronger word than _fucked_ for what he is, like _megafucked_ or _hellafucked_ or _überfuckalized_.  He is überfuckalized beyond recognition; he can’t stop _looking_ , and somebody’s bound to notice and call him out and obliterate everything he’s spent the past four years building from scratch.  He founded an empire, raised a temple, conquered a waste, and now he can feel it _crumbling_.

Not now.  Not when he’s so close to the finish line.  Not when he can practically smell the cake at his own fucking graduation party.

 _Get a goddamn grip, Mustang,_ he thinks.  He’s heard his speaking voice recorded, and the voice in his head is different.  Sometimes he thinks it’s his father’s.  _You’re eight months from a man, you’re the most decorated QB this school has ever had, and you’re_ going _to be a Stanford student.  Get the fuck out there and act like it._

He can do this.

He has to.

He tears his eyes away from Ed and forces them to focus on the coterie of black-and-silver-clad boys slouching on the bench.  His heart is thudding in his ears, and the lights are _always_ too bright, but whether or not they show it, these guys want it, too.  They want to win.  For a lot of them—for Jean, at least, and for all of the dumb jocks who tag along at Roy’s heels because he’s the top dog here—this is all they’ve got.  Football is all they’ve got; winning is all they’ve got; and they _need_ him, or they’re nothing.

Roy breathes in, breathes out, and flexes his fingers.  This is his favorite game in the world.  That’s got to count for something.

The refs wave the cheerleaders off the field, and as most of them prance away with pigtails trailing, the refs stare unabashedly at the part of Roy’s vision that he’s blacking out with a mental Sharpie—harsh, heavy scribbles that can’t quite hide one last standing backflip that earns a ripple of approbation from the crowd.

But as the whole cluster of cheerleaders goes to sit on the track that runs between the field and the bleachers, preserving their pert little asses from the damp grass, the band starts up, and the refs start posturing, and the guys start stretching, and everything is tilting back towards normalcy.  It’s the first official iteration of the year, but this is a process Roy practices nightly in his head.

This is a routine.  This is a regimen.  This is a ritual.  It is a familiar pattern that begins when the band’s brassy overtures and the roar of the crowd fade to a humming at the back of Roy’s head—a sequence that ends with him raising both arms skyward and letting the endorphins rampage through his veins.  It’s just the middle that’s up in the air, buzzing with the lights, flitting and swooping with the moths, and all he has to do is reach out and take it.

There’s a huge collective rustle as everyone gets to their feet so that the band can barge through “The Star-Spangled Banner” while everyone holds their right hands over their left lungs and tries not to look too impatient about the rote patriotism standing between them and their football game.  Roy angles his body towards the flag and his eyes towards the other team.  These are the guys from the district’s other high school, down the road.  These are the guys who have the same geographic region, the same demographics, maybe _better_ test scores, maybe _better_ grades.  The tall guy at the front is the quarterback; Roy read up and stalked him on Facebook, glared at his profile picture until the red and white jersey blurred and looked like blood-splattered snow.  This kid is quite possibly the single biggest threat in the country to Roy’s bid for that Stanford spot.

It’s nothing personal, but Roy is going to destroy him.

There’s a slight breeze—just enough to ruffle the tips of the grass stalks; just enough to tickle the hair at the back of his neck until he fits his helmet on.  The insulation that will be protecting his brain from blunt force trauma for the next two hours doesn’t shut out the noise, but everything does dull a little more.  The rest of the world is fading out to make way for this: the lights, the dirt, the grass, the muscles in Roy’s body, the itch in his fingertips for pebbled leather—just a touch.  His fingers only want to kiss it and let it go.

He always has Heymans call the coin toss; the guy has eyes like a falcon even for a challenge that involves so little skill.  Roy doesn’t believe in luck, but his personal track record for coin-tosses is so shitty it’s a statistical miracle, and he prefers to start the game on his terms.

Heymans doesn’t disappoint.

They take up their lines.  The Hillview QB shouts something, and the red-and-white bodies shuffle like playing cards in Wonderland as they switch their cornerbacks so that the taller one can cover Jean.  Roy gets a glimpse of the QB’s eyes; they’re dark brown and darting every which way; he’s grimacing around his mouthguard already.  Roy doesn’t smile just yet, but it’s nice that these guys have done their homework, and they’re scared.

It’s right about time to give them a reason.

The ref whistles; the clock shudders into motion; they’ve been planning to start this game with this play since Heymans designed it early in the pre-season.

Sometimes, especially in the first couple games of the season, Roy will have a moment where it’s all just _too_ surreal—where the situation is too bizarre, and his _being_ in it is briefly inconceivable, and holy _shit_ football is a stupid game.  He’s crouched down staring between Kain Fuery’s legs, waiting for a ball that’s not even round to get pitched at his head so that he can hurl it to somebody else.  What in the hell are they all _doing_?  Why do people take this _seriously_?

“Hut,” he says.

He can hear his own voice from a few minutes ago reverberating in his head.  _Blue 69—yes, that was_ very _mature, Heymans, ha, ha, ha—and the snap on four.  Everybody crystal?  Ready?  Break!_

“Hut,” he says.

Kain’s fingers twitch in open air.

One of these nights, one of these days, the huddle won’t break; he will.  It’s a weird thought, and it drops in his stomach like a stone.  He’s been flying high since freshman year—how long does he honestly think he can keep this up?

“Hut,” he says.

He drags his fingers through the grass by his right foot and breathes in the damp.  This field is a living thing; and he is a living thing; and there’s some complicated physics reason why the shape of the planet is actually slightly oblong, even if it’s not quite like a football.  There’s nothing he hates more than astroturf on a football field; he has to be a _part_ of this, or the whole thing dissolves into nonsense.  He rubs the grains of dirt into his fingertips and focuses on the way the grass cradles that stupid brown ball.

_Let’s do this._

“Hut,” he says.

Kain’s hands should have their own mythical origin story; the ball smacks into Roy’s palms so sharply his skin tingles; Jean feints right and then jackknifes his narrow body between two Hillview goons and takes off.  There’s a play clock in Roy’s head, bigger and brighter orange than the one on the scoreboard— _one-one-thousand_ — _two-one-thousand_ —

The Hillview lunk shoves past Kain, who yelps as he goes down; their smallest player still makes Kain look like a seventh-grader; no time to worry about whether they knocked one of his contacts out again; the field is a fast-expanding chessboard of black-silver and red-white, and there is an unfriendly bulk barreling towards Roy—

The trick is that you can’t think beyond the pass.  You just have to get the ball out of your hands, get it _moving_ , get it _out_ and _away;_ letting go of it won’t save you, but you can’t think about that yet.  The trick is to shift your arm back and give over to how natural it feels to transport an object by _throwing_ it.  The trick is that you play keep-away every day of your life, and this is just a less existential version of the game that dictates everything.

The trick is to spin the ball off the tips of your fingers as you send it soaring, so that it moves like a bullet and flies directly at the silver _22_ on Jean’s chest.

He tucks it in against his body like a baby, barely interrupts his stride—

And a freight train slams into Roy’s ribcage and drags him to the ground.

Most likely he’s never going to stop wondering, in that first moment of breathless agony, whether he’s damaged his spine this time.  Funny how something so much like a hug can actually kill you, padded uniform and all, if you twist your body just the wrong way.

It makes him feel fragile.  It makes him feel lucky.  It makes him feel alive.

It makes him feel really fucking _sore_.  A stranger actually stopped him in the supermarket sophomore year and stared at his bruises and asked if he was being abused.

The linebacker who just tried to crush him into kibble hops back up, and Roy wheezes in a breath and starts to feel slightly less like Flat Stanley.  The linebacker holds out a hand; Roy thinks that the face behind the helmet mask looks familiar, which means the guy is almost certainly a senior.

 _I’m taking you down,_ Roy thinks. _I’m taking you all down, and I’m taking your scholarships._

He clasps the offered hand around the wrist and shifts his weight to make it easier for the guy to haul him upright.

“Hey, thanks,” he says.

  


* * *

  


So cheerleading is super fucking weird.  It’s like a really stupid roller coaster—you have to be all crazy-excited about the start of the game, and then you have to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and stay there clinging to your pom-pons and pretending to give a crap about the dumb jocks running back and forth between two giant tuning forks, fighting over a piece of leather.  What fucking part of this is cheery?

And then you’re supposed to get progressively more agitated when the plays keep pushing the line of scrimmage (people keep saying “scrimmage” like it doesn’t sound like an STD) down the field.  And you’re supposed to bounce up and down and yell totally insipid things like “Go, go, go!” as if it wouldn’t be distracting if the guy could even hear you.  And _then_ , as it turns out, when Jean Havoc, Moocher of Hobos’ Cigarettes, gets the piece of leather all the way down to the endzone, you have to go _nuts_ , although at least at that point somebody encourages Ed to do a couple ostentatious backflips while the crowd in the bleachers _roars_.

All in all it’s probably a lot like being a little organ-grinder monkey, although admittedly Ed doesn’t have a whole ton of personal experience being a monkey, so he’s drawing on conjecture here.

It’s _sort_ of fun, though, too, after a while—because you do get caught up.  He knows about crowd energy from the part of gymnastics meets before he used to retreat completely into the safety of his head, and from that school play they did in elementary school where Al got really nervous and threw up onstage, but this is some incredible shit.  The air is practically sizzling; and every time there’s a pause for the refs to argue or for the players to catch their breath, the band’ll bludgeon their way through the melody of either an 80s song or something that’s still on the radio; and it’s like the whole world and all of its emotions have been crammed into this little bleacher-bowl crucible, and everyone’s going to _lose_ it.

After Havoc does a touchdown dance so hilariously embarrassing it explains why he’s “serially single” (Alfons should really start a blog or some shit), the little tiny guy whose jersey says _FUERY_ (the extra E makes Ed realize it’s his name instead of a mean-spirited joke) has to go through an elaborate half-play thing and kick the ball through the tuning fork, which for some reason counts for one point even though it’s way more than one-sixth as difficult as running down the field with a ball in your hands.

Mustang goes around squeezing shoulders, not that anybody can probably feel it under all of the padding, and then heads to the sideline and drops onto the bench so some broader-chested defender guy can take his spot on the field.  Watching Mustang is even more interesting than analyzing the mob psychology—the balance of strategy and improvisation in this dumb game pretty much rests on the shoulders of the quarterback, and Mustang gets _intense_.  In the library, even when the calculus is turning his limited little brain into scrambled eggs, he’s really chill and kind of charming—which is obnoxious; Ed hates charisma; you can’t trust power you can’t explain.  This, though, is like watching a friendly cat hunting sparrows.

Mustang tugs his helmet off, dangles it from one hand, and runs the other through his sweaty hair, which sticks up all over the place.  He laughs halfheartedly at something the guy next to him says, and then he’s got his laser-gaze fixated on the field again; every now and then he looks up towards the clock.

Very, very belatedly, Ed realizes he’s staring.

Well, so the fuck what?  Everyone else is looking at the game, but it’s already pretty obvious that their team has more technical skill in basically every aspect of the sport, so unless something goes horribly wrong, they’re going to win, and what happens in the middle isn’t really that important.  It makes more _sense_ to look at the guy who holds all of the shit together on the field, to try to figure out what makes _him_ tick.  That’s what explains everything.

…and so maybe there’s a tiny little sliver of a chance that Roy Mustang’s kind of not totally bad to look at, either.  He’s got a really nice neck, for one thing—graceful.  When he’s leaning forward like this, or bending over his calc book, his hair sort of parts around it, and it just… it curves nicely.  It’s just—it’s a really good neck.  It’s the kind of neck that artists would probably aspire to drawing, and poets would write lots of badly-rhymed sappy shit about.  It’s not _wrong_ to want to look at a neck that’s really good to look at.

…and so maybe Mustang’s eyes are kind of nice, too, and his nose, and he has an interesting chin, and holy _shit_ he has nice hands.

Ed really hopes that if the other team scores, they’re allowed to shout obscenities.  Nobody’s taught him a “F-U-C-K, who’s the team that sucks today?” cheer yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have one.  Jesus, anything to distract his stupid animal brain from _Mustang_.

Just then one of the girls near him goes, “ _Oh_ —!”, and Ed looks at the field just in time to see the one whose jersey says _BREDA_ ram his shoulder into the other-team guy running with the ball, and the ball pops up out of his arms like a buttered eel (Mom used to say that; it still doesn’t make any damn sense)—

And Breda scoops it right out of the air, and the disembodied voice from the speakers thunders “ _Fumble goes to the Timberwolves_!”, and then everybody in the bleachers just goes batshit, and all the other cheerleaders are whooping and flailing around even as Breda gets tackled to the grass.

Ed would’ve thought _Breda_ wouldn’t be celebrating, at least, given that he just got his face mashed into the field, but when the guy clambers back up to his feet, he’s grinning like he just won the lottery.

Clearly everybody who enjoys this game has lost their fuckin’ minds.

  


* * *

  


“Halftime already?” Hughes sings.  “My goodness, this game is so riveting, I can’t believe how fast it’s going!  Isn’t that right, sweetie?  Isn’t this fun?”

‘Fun’ is one word for it, though Alfons thinks ‘ass-numbing’ might be more apt.

“Yeah, Daddy!”  If nothing else, Elysia seems to have inherited her father’s boundless enthusiasm.  Alfons kind of wishes he had that hereditary predisposition.  “Canna have a hot choklit?”

Ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like children.  Ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like to be mothered, which of course is just one letter short of _smothered_ ; ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like to be petted and looked after and cared for, because it makes him feel confined.

But the Hugheses are extraordinary to say the least.  They’re his family; they _chose_ him, and they took him in and wrapped him up in their warm little nuclear nest even though he doesn’t belong.  He loves them for a lot of things, but he loves them the most for that—for _wanting_ him.

“Of course you can, cupcake!” Hughes is saying.  “Sweeties for my sweetie!”

And then it’s time for a round of the very familiar stubble-snuggle game, which elicits a series of squeals from Elysia.  Alfons is still surprised every time to find that what bubbles in his throat at moments like this is laughter instead of bile.

“Let me take her,” Gracia says, running a hand up and down Hughes’s arm.  “You try to get a picture of the boys all together before Edward has to perform.”

“Beautiful _and_ brilliant,” Hughes sighs, swooping in to kiss her.  “I lead a charmed life.  You heard the perfect woman, Alpha Males—come on!”

Alfons is going to kill Ed for sharing that nickname with Hughes.

Al picks his way down the bleachers, stepping in empty spaces and vacated seats, and just by the delicateness of it, Alfons can tell he’d be every bit as stunningly acrobatic as Ed is.

Alfons shouldn’t be watching Al.  He should be watching where he’s going.  He should be watching his back, because no one else is going to do it for him.

“Oh,” Frank Archer, captain of the lacrosse team and full-time dickwad, says as he elbows Alfons’s shin almost hard enough to send him toppling, “didn’t see you there.”

“It’s fine,” Alfons says, trying to step past him and finding a pale hand in the path of his retreat.

“How’s your Mexican girlfriend?” Archer asks.

Alfons could say a lot of things.  He could say _Noah is Romani, you ignorant shit_.  He could say _She’s not my girlfriend; we just had total and complete ostracism in common_.  He could say _She’s at community college taking classes to transfer, because she has a future, unlike you_.

What he says is, “Have you met Mr. Hughes?  He’s a police detective for the county.”

There’s a list a mile long of things Alfons appreciates about Hughes, and one of those things is the fierce intellect underneath the exuberance.

“Sorry,” Hughes says, holding out a hand and holding up a grin that doesn’t touch his eyes.  “What was your name, again?”

Archer mumbles something as he shakes and becomes significantly less obstructive to Alfons’s descent.  Alfons would count it as a victory if he didn’t know he was going to pay for it in blood and humiliation come Monday.

But Monday’s still a ways off, isn’t it?  He just wants to have fun tonight.  Is that really so much to ask?

Al’s already leaning over the railing and waving his arms by the time Alfons and Hughes make it to the bottom of the bleachers; people jostle past them to get to the stairs, strangely delighted to go pay too much for food and lame commemorative junk.

“Brother!” Al is shouting.  “Hey, Ed!”

Ed, of course, responds like a dog at his master’s whistle—if a dog could dart over, shimmy up one of the poles that raises the bleachers six feet off of the ground, and sling himself up onto the ledge to come level with them inside of thirty seconds.  “Hey!”

Al flings both arms around him and hugs him happily despite the metal railing in the way.  “You look amazing out there, Brother!”

Ed blushes faintly.  “Shut up, I do not.”  He tugs on the fringe of Al’s scarf.  “You warm enough?”

“Yes,” Al says.  “C’mere, Alfons—”

Just like that, Ed has his free arm draped over Alfons’s shoulders, and Hughes is blinding them all with the flash.

“Is there a halftime show?” Al asks.  “I really need to pee, but I don’t want to miss anything.”

“They’re doing some stupid homecoming court thing,” Ed says.  “With cars.  The dominant girl in the squad is in it ’cause she got nominated, so the rest of us are just supposed to stay out of the way.”

Alfons leans over the rail and cranes his neck.  Sure enough, they’re opening one of the gates onto the track, and they’re carefully driving in three old-school convertibles.  The one in front is a cherry-red Mustang, and Alfons can guess where this is going.

“Oh,” he says.  “I heard about this last year.  They parade the homecoming court nominees around a little and then literally put them on a pedestal.”

Ed blinks at him and then blinks out at the honest-to-goodness red carpet they’re unfurling on the football field.  To their heretofore-nonexistent credit, most of the players look extremely unimpressed.

“So essentially,” Al says, “it’s the the Westminster dog show, but with popular kids.”

Alfons could kiss him.

  


* * *

  


This is stupid.  Roy had forgotten about this—two years ago, he’d just started QBing for the frosh-soph team, and he went home and passed out before the varsity game started; last year, the entire game was a maelstrom of panic and terrified desperation, and he _thinks_ he spent halftime in the locker room, alternately hydrating and hyperventilating.  Which is what he’d really prefer to be doing now.  That and maybe taking a piss.  Gatorade really runs through you.

Instead, though, he’s standing in the backseat of a slow-moving Mustang (oh, _ha_ , never heard that one before) striving to amuse himself by doing a little Queen-of-England wave.

“This year,” Olivia Armstrong says, “it is my mission to halve the football budget.”

“I really doubt they even let you see the numbers,” Roy says.  Olivia’s thick, pale eyelashes lower, and the corner of her mouth twitches downward.  “The way I understand it, Student Body President is more or less a symbolic position, unless you count picking the prom theme as actual power.”

A vein pulses in Olivia’s temple.  Ten points to Roy.

“Actual power,” Olivia says, “is the ability to dictate the fate of another human being.  Do you really want to play this game with me, Mustang?”

Roy used to dream that the shooting sparks between him and Olivia would resolve into an attraction that could turn them into the school’s golden couple.  Over time he realized that what he had interpreted as electric sexual tension was actually her genuine hatred of every fiber of his being—which is too bad, given that she fits squarely into the blonde-with-a-great-ass category.

Oh, well.  She’s not angling for his Stanford spot because she wants to go ‘a real Ivy’, to which end he wishes her all the best and hopes that she freezes her great ass off in the snow.

“Not particularly,” he says.  “I can only assume that you hate me because you think I’m a threat to your social influence.”

By the look she gives him, her mission for the year has changed from cutting the football budget to cutting off his head.  Or maybe something lower.

Jesus, perish _that_ thought.

“Don’t fuck with me, Mustang,” Olivia says.  “I will make an exhibition of the skeletons in your closet.”

Idly, Roy thinks, _There’s nothing in my closet._

Then he thinks, _Except for me, apparently._

And then he thinks, _Well, shit._

  


* * *

  


When Ed scampers off to turn a few cartwheels on the field before the game starts again, Mr. Hughes bounds back up the bleachers to get a few pictures of Elysia sipping hot chocolate, and Al sees Alfons start in surprise as they turn more slowly.

A very, very pretty girl with brown eyes is watching them interestedly.

“Are you Al Elric?” she asks.

His instinct is to shake his head slowly and back away slower, but instead he smiles and offers his hand.  “Sure am!”

She puts down her pen—she has a page of notes and diagrams on a clipboard, and if he’s not mistaken they’re criticisms of the Timberwolves’ performance in the first half of this football game—and shakes warmly.  “Riza Hawkeye.  This is Maria.”

Maria has short dark hair and is also extremely pretty, especially with that beaming smile.  Is there something in the water around here?

“Welcome to the school,” Riza is saying.  “Are you settling in all right?”

“Great,” Al lies.

“Everyone treating you okay so far?” Maria asks, and Al sees Alfons _twitch_.

“So far,” Al says, which is… slightly less of a lie.

Alfons reaches for Al’s sleeve and then stops with his hand hovering halfway between them.  “We should probably get back to our seats…”

“See you around,” Riza says.

Alfons leads the way back up, and Al doesn’t comment on the fact that they take a very different route than they did descending.

“Interesting,” Alfons says, shoving his gloved hands into his jacket pockets as they sit.

“What?” Al asks.

“Roy and Riza aren’t dating,” Alfons says.  “Maria Ross is Riza’s second-in-command on the field hockey team.  Did you see how close they were sitting?”

“But girls do that a lot,” Al says.  “And they can get away with linking their arms and stuff.”

Oh, dear.  Now it sounds like he wants to be allowed to link arms with other guys.  The fact that he _does_ is not the point.

Alfons doesn’t seem to notice.  “That’s the thing, though—that’s usually a showy, _look what BFFs we are_ gesture, but they were close in a way that was just… comfortable.  And not for warmth, by the way they were dressed; just… for _them_.”

Alfons has such lovely eyes.

Al looks down at his own knees and smoothes out a wrinkle in the denim.  “You really could tear this school apart,” he says.  “You have everyone figured out.”

“Except myself, obviously,” Alfons says, and then the announcer shouts something at a hideously unnecessary volume that makes the speakers crackle with static, and the game starts up again.

  


* * *

  


Roy darts into the locker room to fetch his phone and darts back out again to hit the speed-dial in the crisp air; his blood is pure champagne, and the bubbles are rushing to his head.  He only has to wait two rings before the line picks up, and he can hear the hubbub in the background.  “Mom!”

“Did you bulldoze the bastards and crush their sad little dreams?” his mother asks calmly.

Roy holds the door to the locker room for Kain, who flashes him a grin.  “Uh… yes?  Sorry I didn’t text you at the half; there was—”

“Oh, I know.  Riza sent me a picture.”

“Aw, crap.”

“My little baby’s all grown up.  I left lasagna in the fridge for you—nuke it for two minutes and then chop it up a little and then do another two.”

He can’t eat before games; the nerves make him nauseous.  “Thanks, Mom.”

“Go ahead and turn off the porch light when you get home.  And get some _sleep_ —you’ve got the stupid dance tomorrow night.”

Jon Pritchard high-fives him; the door swings shut.  “Can’t make any promises.”

“Brat,” his mother says.  “Oh, and—Roy?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m proud of you, kiddo.”

That’s even better than lasagna.


	2. Louder Than Bells

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SO SORRY. I WILL POST THE REST NEXT WEEKEND. ~~I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON.~~

“This is a bad idea,” Alfons says as Saturday night crawls towards eight o’clock.

Ed’s collar is already itching, but he tries to adjust it without Alfons noticing.  “You think _everything_ ’s a bad idea.”

“Most things are,” Alfons says.  “This is in particular.”

“Plenty of people go to homecoming dances during their high school careers without incident,” Al says.

“We’re not like most people,” Alfons says.

Admittedly, it’s hard to argue with that.

“ _Hurry up, guys_!” Winry shouts from the entryway.

Gracia beams as they troop out.  “Oh, you boys look so handsome.  Are you sure you had enough to eat?”

Ed’s always kinda hungry, but there’ll be food at the stupid dance-thing.

Winry assesses them with a much more critical eye while Hughes fits a new lens onto his camera.  “You guys clean up okay, I guess.”

“You all look great,” Noah says.

“How long is this going to take?” Paninya asks.  “I’ve got a WoW raid at midnight.”

Ed is starting to side with Alfons about this whole thing.  It sort of figures that once you bring _girls_ into something, it totally goes to crap.

“Smile!” Hughes says, and since it’s pretty much impossible to say _no_ to him even when the flash has had you blinded for the last five minutes, they do.  They take a couple pictures with Elysia, too, just messing around and letting her try on Winry’s gauzy wrap-scarf-thing and stuff, and Hughes squeals something about princesses, and Ed thinks it kind of sucks that this is probably going to be the highlight of the night.

  


* * *

  


Andie Peterson is not impressed.  Roy can’t really blame her, but it still rankles a little bit.

Roy marched into the DMV the _day_ he turned fifteen-and-a-half in order to minimize the time he’d spend futzing around with a measly permit.  He wanted his license, and he was going to _get_ it.

The marching, of course, was promptly followed up with a rigorous bout of sitting in a hard plastic chair for two hours, watching the alphanumerical nonsense blinking on the screens and finally understanding the concept of Purgatory, but it paid off.

The first time he gathered all of his friends around the car, there was silence for a long moment.

Vato broke it: “I read that this model is extremely safe.”

“Not that Roy will need it to be,” Riza said calmly, “as he will be driving like an especially cautious saint, but that’s good to know.”

Jean scratched at the back of his head.  “Not exactly a chick magnet, though, is it?”

“Nah,” Heymans said, “but you could fit three dead bodies in the back.”

“Thank you for that,” Roy said.

“Just being practical,” Heymans said.

“That wasn’t practical,” Roy said.  “That was creepy.”

“Semantics,” Heymans said.

“Well, it’s _a_ car,” Kain said.  “That’s more than any of us have got.”

Evidently, however, Andie Peterson is not enamored of the blunt steel nobility of the Volvo 240 station wagon.  “Um, maybe we should get a cab.”

Roy weighs his options swiftly and says, “That would probably make us late.  Anyone who’s standing around outside the gym watching the cars that drive up is crazy anyway, and anyone who looks at my car instead of at _you_ is even crazier.”

That’s much less likely to get him slapped than either “Do you actually realize how expensive taxis are?” or “Woman, don’t you _dare_ disrespect my goddamn motherfucking Volvo.”

Roy is aware that the only two reasons he’s survived adolescence thus far are that he can throw a football and that he has an excellent internal censor.

In any case, the conciliation worked.  “I guess you’re right,” Andie says.  “Together we’re going to be pretty distracting.”

Roy flashes his highest-wattage smile, opens the passenger door, and gestures munificently.  Andie smiles back prettily, gathers her skirt, sits, and lifts her strappy-heeled feet in.  Roy closes the door carefully and allows himself a moment of relieved triumph about remembering to shake out the floor mats and stash the shitty seat covers in the garage.

He wonders, as they creep along the familiar streets to the restaurant—at which he also remembered, _smoothly_ , thanks much, to make a reservation—what he would even talk about with his peers if he didn’t have football.  _“You were great in the game on Friday,” “Oh, no, no, it’s a team effort; I’d be nothing without those guys,” “But you’re the one who picks the plays and throws the ball”_ , and there it is—that’s what his local-newspaper-level fame amounts to.

He supposes that’s not the worst thing in the world.  He supposes it could be a hell of a lot worse.  He supposes that his life is pretty solid, pretty pleasant, pretty _grand_.  He supposes he should count his blessings, take his licks, and thank his lucky stars.

Unfortunately, Roy’s never been much good at settling for anything less than perfection.  He gets these _itches_ —they’re deeper and larger than just yearnings of his heart; these are diseases of the _soul_ , and they pour through his body until they consume him.  He wants _more_.  He wants _everything_.  He wants the world on a platter decked with silver spoons; he wants to have his cake and eat it too and follow it up with Kona coffee.

For starters, he’s going to work the room at this stupid dance.  He’s stuck here, so he might as well, right?

He jumps out almost before he’s finished parking so that he can get Andie’s door.  Deftly, as they stroll towards the stupid dance in question, he guides her forearm to lay on top of his like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire always do in the movies his mom likes.  Classy never goes out of style, right?  If only he had a top hat.  No, on second thought, he’d get simultaneously torn apart and eaten alive for wearing a top hat into that lousy gymnasium; standing out at a time like this is the best way to guarantee your own destruction.

“Hi, Andie!” the volunteer mom sitting at the table in the lobby says.  “Oh, you’re so _darling_.”  She fixes her laser-PTA-mom gaze on Roy.  “I know _you_ , don’t I?  The quarterback?  Did you want to check your coat, sweetie?  You can always come back and leave it later.”

“I think I’m all right for now, thanks,” he says.

“Okie-dokie!” Power Mom says.  “You have your tickets, hon?”

There’s a very absurd moment in Roy’s brain where it wonders why all pet names have to do with sugar and confections and crap—sweetie-pie, cupcake, honey-bun, whatever.  Why doesn’t anybody ever coo _baby tiger shark_ , or _tiny little non-poisonous snake_ , or even… shit, _snuggly kitten_ or something?  Snuggly kittens are about a billion times cuter than cupcakes on a very basic level.

There’s an even stranger moment where Roy’s brain starts to think the societal and cultural implications of referring to human beings as edible commodities.

“Roy?” Andie asks.

Shit, how long has he been zoned out for?  He fumbles to slide the tickets out of the pocket in the lining of his jacket and hands them over to Power Mom.  “Yeah—yeah, sorry.”

And then they’re getting their hands stamped with invisible UV ink—like this is Chuck E. Cheese’s; or, for the favorable comparison, the aquarium—and being swept up into the humid crush of humanity writhing and seething over every square foot of the no-longer-familiar gym.  Through the haze of hanging, half-evaporated sweat, Roy can make out several dozen clusters of balloons and arcs of streamers that make him doubt both the eyesight and the sanity of the student body’s decorating committee.

Andie’s grip on Roy’s arm tightens fractionally, and she presses up against him a little.  That should be hot.  That should be unbearably hot.  Why is his heart still just ambling along at its normal pace?

“I can’t believe there are so many _people_ at this school,” Andie says.  “Can you see anybody we know?”

It doesn’t really make sense of her to ask; the Venn diagrams of their respective friends barely overlap.

“Um,” Roy says noncommittally.

“Yo, chief!” a voice calls, and then the whole gang is squeezing their way out of the crowd.  That really busty Goth chick—who Roy could’ve _sworn_ was dating Very Scary Turkish Exchange Student Guy back before he exchange-graduated—is hanging on Jean’s arm, and Rebecca Catalina is swinging from Heymans’s.  Kain and Sheska are huddled so adorably close that they take up about a square inch of space between the two of them, and Riza and Maria look somehow both mouth-wateringly gorgeous and extremely stately in coordinating shades of green.  There’s a lot of awkward waving and greetings shouted over the crappy music, and a few even-more-awkward hugs—although maybe Roy and Maria are the only ones who know Riza well enough to notice how frigidly she embraces Andie and to share a grimace behind her back.

“So what’s up?” Roy asks.  His throat already feels raw from all the yelling over the migraine-worthy bass.  “Other than the incredibly shitty décor, I mean.”

“Don’t let Olivia hear you say that,” Riza says calmly.  “I think she’s wearing the shoes with the concealed knives again.”

“All the cookies are homemade,” Heymans says.

“It’s pretty much junk food El Dorado over there!” Rebecca adds.  “We figure if we go over there every half-hour in different coats and wraps and shit stolen from the coat check, the moms won’t recognize us, so they’ll keep letting us take stuff.”  She and Heymans fist-bump, and Jean looks like a kicked puppy, which makes _his_ date looks like a pissed-off cat, and Roy hates high school.

“Can you make a genius masterplan for somebody requesting music that doesn’t suck?” he asks.

Andie giggles.  “It’s not _so_ bad.  C’mon, you don’t need _good_ music to dance.”

Oh, God, this is the horrible, inescapable Catch-22.  If Roy dances well, he’s a poser; if he dances poorly, he’s a nerd; if he dances suggestively, he runs the risk of getting kicked out and is guaranteed catcalls and rumors—and no matter what he does, it’s embarrassing as _hell_.  If he _doesn’t_ dance, he’s an emasculated coward who can’t keep up with his date.  This is a game that nobody—or at least no dude—ever wins.

“Uh,” Roy says helplessly.

Andie grabs his hand—hey, _there_ are some sparks; that’s good; that’s a plus; his nerves still work, and they still respond to hot girls, and he’s fine, he’s _normal_ —and starts hauling him into the deeper densities of gyrating students.

Roy’s pretty sure now that there is a hell, and he just found it in the Trinton High School gym.

But then… the music changes.  He recognizes this—

It’s the Green Day song “Holiday”, and he gets a lurching flashback to the era when listening to an album called _American Idiot_ amidst whispers of wiretapping could make a kid feel like the biggest rebel this side of James Dean.

The reverie doesn’t survive a high-pitched screech from somewhere nearby, however, and then people are scattering and shifting, and Andie drags him _closer_ to the chaos, and he almost collides with Al Elric’s shoulder before he realizes that there’s an open circle of gym floor now, and Ed and a gorgeous girl in blue are standing in the middle of it.

The gorgeous girl is a blonde with a more-than-qualified ass, so part of Roy swoons for her on sight.

But the rest of him belongs to Ed now.  So the rest of him instantaneously crumples.

Straight _or_ taken might have been all right.  Both, at once, in this single moment of surprise—it feels like his heart’s been whacked with a curtain rod.  Its feeble wings shudder and then fail, and he crashes to the runway, and steel squashes like tinfoil, and the wreckage scuds to a stop and bursts into flames.

Ed has a hot girlfriend.  _Ed_ has a _hot girlfriend_.

All is lost.

Hot Girlfriend bounces (and _damn_ , her cleavage bounces, too, and Roy can almost hear Jean drooling form here) and then punches Ed in the shoulder and takes his hands, and he rolls his eyes, and then he starts to… dance.

If Roy’s not mistaken—and he could be—that’s swing.  Ed is _swing-dancing_ at Homecoming, with his hot girlfriend, with an almost-wistful grin across his face.

Roy doesn’t even know what to watch—Ed’s _hips_ , Ed’s _hair_ , that just-off-kilter smile.  This is choreographed, and they’re in perfect unison; they’re like two halves of one fantastically talented blond creature with two fine asses and four impossibly clever feet.

If this is the dawning of the rest of Roy’s life, he wants a refund.  Hot Girlfriend’s breathless laughter as Ed spins her out and then winds her back in along the length of his arm makes Ed _happy_ —and isn’t that the important thing?

“Mom was their coach,” Al is saying to that Alfons Heiderich kid.  “She was really big on social dance even before she ended up at Stanford, and there was this one rainy day when Winry was over, and Ed wouldn’t stop saying he was _bored_ , because he’d finished reading his new chemistry book, and… well, in the end, they took this routine to a couple competitions, and they did pretty well, but… Ed didn’t even want to talk about it for years.  He still won’t, if you bring it up, but I heard him listening to Glenn Miller in his room the other day, and I thought maybe it was worth a shot.”

Ed looks uncharacteristically not-heinously-sullen-and-cynical right now.  Ed looks like he’s having _fun_.  Ed looks like sashaying back and forth across these faded boards and whipping this cute girl around with him is the greatest thing he’s ever done and maybe the thing he was _meant_ to do.  He’s a powerhouse; he’s exhilarated; he’s exuberant.  He bears only the faintest resemblance to the sharp-eyed, flat-voiced math critic who slouches in library chair and jabs his pencil tip at Roy.  The cheerleader verve was _too_ bright, when Roy dared to look; that was fake, and this is real.  This is the real Ed, the _right_ Ed, the Ed that Roy wants to draw out of the faded hoodies and hold tight to his chest.

Only the unknown challenger Hot Girlfriend beat him to the chase.  By several years, apparently.  And she can _dance_.

Ed’s ponytail is like a pendulum in double-time; he’s wearing a dark blue waistcoat to match Hot Girlfriend’s dress, and his hips are a perpetual motion machine.  Roy doesn’t know much about how competitive swing gets scored, but Ed’s got so much style and surety that he’s absolutely mesmerizing, and his lines are clean, and every step’s precise, and there’s a weird pulse in Roy’s whole body—a weird compulsion to be _close_ to him.

So.  Fucking.  Doomed.

“He’s kind of a crappy cheerleader,” Andie says, and Roy takes _offense_ to that, “but he’s… there’s something… about him.”

“Guess so,” Roy says.  “Can I get you something to drink?”

She looks at him like he’s crazy.  Or an alien.  Or a crazy alien—a crazalien.

…maybe he _is_ crazy.  That would explain a lot.

“Y’know,” he says, gesturing towards the back wall to the best of his ability given that he can barely shift a muscle without elbowing someone.  “El Dorado.”

“I’m okay,” she says slowly.  “Aren’t you going to watch thi—”

He slips off through the mass of high school humanity before she can develop ESP and figure out that the twist of Ed’s hair is imprinted on his eyelids like a neon afterglow, and the angles of Ed’s body make his blood beat and his guts churn like he’s stuck on a roller coaster, hanging upside-down.

They told him he was big enough to get on this ride.

  


* * *

  


Al had gauged the odds at right about fifty-fifty as to whether Ed would be delighted or distraught.  He’s pleased and relieved that tonight the gamble paid off.

They run into Roy Mustang—again, because Al saw him staring; he’s holding back on conclusions for now—by the drinks table, whence Ed beelines for water the moment Winry’s done curtseying to the crowd.  Roy has a frosted sugar cookie in one hand and a glass of punch in the other, and Al can’t tell whether the expression of mortification that flits onto his face for a moment is because they’ve caught him double-fisting carbs, or because of something… else.

“Yo,” Ed says, which is actually fairly graceful for one of Ed’s greetings.  “This is my friend Winry, and this is my friend Paninya, and this is my friend Noah.  This is the quarterback guy, Win.”

“You didn’t say he was _smokin’_ ,” Winry says in a very audible whisper, beaming and giving Roy a little finger-wave.

“Jesus, you’re so fucking _embarrassing_ ,” Ed mutters.

“Roy, right?” Winry asks.

“Right,” Ed cuts in as Roy opens his mouth.  “Move your ass, Roy.  What’s good?”

“Nice to see you again, Noah,” Roy says, in that painstakingly level tone that socially-aware people always use to try to smooth over Ed’s awkwardness.  “And nice to meet you both.  The—snickerdoodles are nice.”

“I fucking love snickerdoodles,” Ed says, scouring the table in earnest now.  “Where are they hiding those bastards?”

“Here,” Roy says, sidestepping, but Ed moves to follow, so he doesn’t get far, and Ed’s arm bumps Roy’s as he reaches past, and for a fraction of a second, Roy looks _stricken_.

That’s interesting.

“So—” Roy clears his throat and smiles so fluidly at Winry and Paninya that Al almost forgets what he just saw.  “Have you been here before?  To our humble campus, I mean.”

At Al’s right, Alfons cocks an eyebrow, plants his feet, and watches critically.

“We drove past when we found out Ed and Al were transferring here,” Winry says, “but I’ve never really walked around.”  She smiles warmly back at him.  “It’s really pretty, and I like the hills.  Our school’s totally _flat_ —it’s really boring.”

“Little bit’ve TNT would fix that,” Ed volunteers through a mouthful of snickerdoodle.

“Don’t be an idiot, Ed,” Paninya says.  “A demolition project of a sufficient scale to change the topography of the whole high school would require a _lot_ -bit of TNT.  And a lot of very careful wiring, and the surveying alone would take weeks—”

“Yeah,” Ed says, “if you were _serious_ about it, but if you were just tryin’ to make the place not-flat anymore, let’s face it, you get a load-bearing pillar in _one_ major building, and—”

“You can’t half-ass large-scale demolition,” Paninya says.

“I’m _no_ —”

“Both of you get a cookie and shut up,” Winry says.  She flutters her eyelashes at Roy.  “So… I hear you won the game last night.”

Roy shrugs, the tip of his index finger making short, slightly twitchy trails through the condensation on his cup.  “Well, the team won, yeah.  It was great.  I’m really proud; we had a lot of new guys on the field, but nobody let the nerves get to them, and it went better than I could’ve hoped for.”

“It was a good game,” Alfons says, hands shoved into his pockets, gaze angled low.

“You were there?” Roy asks, looking genuinely pleased—what is he, a _puppy_ passing himself off as high school royalty?  “Well—thanks.  I’m glad you came.  I hope you had fun.”

Alfons blinks, and a flash of terror widens his eyes.  Al wants to save him, but he’s honestly not sure how.

“Did you say you knew Noah?” Winry asks, because Winry is a marvelous human being, whatever Ed says on the not-particularly-rare occasions when he’s being a snot.

“Physics,” Roy says, grinning at Noah.  “It wasn’t too ba… all right, it was hellish, and we almost tore a calculator apart with our bare hands this one time when the lab really wasn’t going our way, but… we survived.”

“Yeah,” Noah says.

There is a long pause.  Winry gives Al a sharp look that very clearly translates to _Your turn this time_.

“You didn’t come stag, did you?” Al asks Roy.  He’s pretty sure he saw a girl hovering by Roy’s shoulder during that first encounter, but Roy probably accumulates a cloud of ambient female admirers at most social functions.

“Me?” Roy says.  “Oh, no, I’m here with Andie.”  He directs the name at Ed, who… stares at him, chewing slowly.  “…Andie Peterson?  …the cheer team captain?”

Ed scrunches up his nose.  “Blonde?” he asks around the crumbs.  “About…” He raises a hand slightly above his head, palm flat.  “…tall?  Doesn’t really get her wrists set right for handsprings, so she’ll prob’ly break one right before a competition, ’specially since we all know I’m such a fucking good luck charm?”

“That’s Andie,” Alfons says after Roy’s stood there for a moment trying to work his mouth and failing.

“Y… eah,” Roy says faintly.  “I, um—better go find Jean; if he looks at Riza the wrong way, she’ll build a gallows and hang him with his small intestine, and—” He stops.  Ed grins wolfishly.  “Uh.  I’m—sorry.  It was nice seeing you all; I’ll just… be going—”

He pitches his punch cup into the recycling and makes a run for it.

“Did Ed just short-circuit a perfectly normal guy again?” Winry asks.

“‘Again’?” Noah asks incredulously.

“He’s not normal,” Ed says.  “He sucks at calculus.  Well, he did when we started; he doesn’t suck too much anymore.  But he’s a _football freak_.  That’s not normal.  And he wants to go to _Stanford_.”

“Mom loved Stanford,” Al says, as Al always says, because someone has to, and he’s usually there, and Ed never growls and hungrily eyeballs the speaker’s throat when Al steps up and says it.

Ed grumbles something vaguely murderous.  Al and Winry sigh in unison.

“Can you pass me a snickerdoodle?” Alfons says.

Paninya hands him five.

  


* * *

  


Alfons was right, of course, though he takes no pride in it—this was a bad idea.

But so far it hasn’t been so horrible that he’s wanted to melt into a puddle and seep through the floorboards just yet.  And the snickerdoodles were pretty good.

Whoever triumphed in their absolute lack of crafting talent and rudimentary aesthetic sensitivity all over the gym was kind enough to extend one of the banks of bleachers for the wallflowers and the weary-footed to retreat to.  No one in their party seems to want to dance, so they ended up migrating over here, where you can _almost_ hear yourself think over the stupid music.  Winry and Noah are talking about college and shoes (sometimes alternately, sometimes at once); and Ed and Paninya are sketching a diagram of the other high school and rigging it for demolition (which could probably get them suspended); and Alfons and Al are just sort of… sitting.

It’s really nice, finding someone who doesn’t mind just _sitting_.  With most people, if you ask them to wait more than ten seconds at a stretch, they’ll pull out their phone and start tapping at the screen, just to have something to do with their hands and their eyes.  Most people can’t just _be_ for a minute, or two, or three.

Al seems to be really damn good at just _being_.  Al seems to _like_ the process of _being_ , which Alfons wishes he didn’t kind of… envy.  Al has a sort of satisfied serenity at his core that Alfons yearns for and wonders at and can’t really understand.  Was he like that, once?  He can’t remember.  There’s just the sickness in him now—the fear.  The jumpiness; the self-conscious, self-critical, self-abasing poison that simmers in his stomach and trickles through his veins.  There’s just the shadow in every corner, and the curse on every tongue, and the drawn-back fists and the merciless eyes and the endless _terror_ tugging at his clothes.  There’s just the feeble tinfoil armor that he builds from observations bound together, so that he can anticipate at least a little of the abuse in time to run.

“I’m so delighted that we came,” Al says, grinning wryly.  “We certainly couldn’t have done _this_ at home, without the funereal suits and the impending headache.”

“Well, we got to watch Roy Mustang’s brain fry,” Alfons says.  He just feels… better, sometimes—next to Al.  Saner.  Nowhere’s safe, anymore, not here, not in this stage of his lifetime (will it _stop_ being like this someday?  He hopes, some nights; but some nights it’s too dark, and he doesn’t remember what the world used to look like when the light hit)—but next to Al, with just a couple inches between their shoulders… it feels like there are places to escape to.  It feels like he could hide for a while, behind Al’s scathing deadpan wit, behind his invincible slowly-lifting eyebrow, behind his absolute indifference to anyone’s opinion but Ed’s.

And behind his jaw-dropping natural aptitude for jujutsu.  That doesn’t hurt.

“Hey, good news,” Al says.  He leans in closer—he’s wearing a dark red tie; there’s a tiny smudge of chocolate at the outside edge of his lower lip—and squints as he points out into the crowd.  “Frank Archer dances like a drunk octopus.”

Alfons is glad he ran out of punch a couple minutes ago, because if he’d been drinking just now, he would’ve choked and _died_.

  


* * *

  


Ed does _not_ have the attention span of a gnat.  He has the attention span of a… something.  Something attentive.

But Winry wanted to dance a little more, and it’s more or less his and Al’s fault she had to come all the way out here, so he humored her, and they improvised some stuff, and now he’s thirstier than a desert in a drought and about as warm.

He grabs a cup of water from the table laid out with them—which is just _waiting_ for some wiseass to come by with either some drug-spiking shit or a handful of dead spiders, and Ed can’t decide which is worse; he glares over at the moms who are chattering about their precious babies instead of _monitoring_ this shit—and briefly considers lingering in disgustingly humid gymnasium hell.

Taking ‘briefly’ to mean ‘for a grand total of about .002 seconds’.

Which bears _no_ reflection on his _attention span_ , thank you _very_ much.

He slips out past the coat check and reassures the actually-doing-her-volunteer-job mom at the door that he’s already had the back of his hand inexpertly smeared with UV ink, and then he’s _free_ and breathing _open air_ on the front steps.

“Oh,” somebody says.

Ed glances over, and it’s Roy.

Of _course_ it is.  Dude is fucking everywhere.  And probably fucking every _one_ ; Ed saw Bad Handsprings Type-A Personality Blonde Fellow Cheerleader getting ridiculously cozy with his arm earlier, and girls watch his every mood like he’s roadkill, and they’re starving wolves.

…that’d kind of funny, actually, given the whole mascot thing.

Roy looks—startled, Ed supposes, and kind of… small, just sitting there on the steps with his elbows on his knees and his folded hands between them.  All the guys look huge in all of the massive amounts of padding they put on before they hurl themselves at each other on the grass; and even when his brain is melting during calc tutoring, Roy tends to sit up pretty straight and hold his shoulders really wide.

“Hey,” Roy says.

“S’up,” Ed says.

“Not a lot,” Roy says.  “Needed some air.  Too much Lady Gaga.”

Ed would hamstring anybody who called him an expert, but he’s pretty sure they only played ‘Born This Way’.  He swills his water around and tries to look interested in fluid dynamics.  “Yeah, it’s practically a fucking rainforest in there.  Maybe there’ll be some new species of tree frog by Monday.”

Roy smiles out at the parking lot, tugging at the cuff on his coat sleeve.  “ _Gymnasium perspiricus_.”

“ _Gross_ ,” Ed says, trying not to grin.

“Seriously,” Roy says.  “It freaks me out having to breathe in there; God knows what I’m getting in my lungs.”

“Axe, mostly,” Ed says.

“And hairspray,” Roy says.

“We’re all going to die,” Ed says.

“Yup,” Roy says.  “I’d hoped for something slightly more spectacular.”

Ed goes and sits down next to him—not too close, especially since he sort of… tenses.  Dude is _weird_ ; what the fuck does he think Ed’s going to do, _bite_?  Spring a pop quiz on him?  Pour the cup of water on his goddamn corsage?

Ed should expand that, though, to be fair: dude is weird, yes, but that’s because _people_ are weird, and it’s not really Roy’s fault that he’s a _person_.

“Hey,” Ed says.  “Aren’t you supposed to be, like, Homecoming Tyrant or whatever?”

“Riza will text me when they start looking for me,” Roy says.  He’s twisting his hands around each other _real_ slowly, like it’s an art form or some shit, and his eyes dart to Ed and then away.  “It’s funny, I guess; I didn’t realize at the start that there were so many other responsibilities attached to football.  The social aspect is kind of… draining.”

“I just reject socializing on principle,” Ed says.  “It’s way easier.”

“That’s not true,” Roy says, looking at him for a moment longer this time.  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

…the fuck are they even _talking_ about?

Ed’s tongue is getting tangled as _fuck_ -all around that question, and he hasn’t managed to force it out before there are feet on the steps behind them.  He half-prepares himself to stand and drop straight into a fighting stance even as he turns to look; sometimes he wonders if Winry’s right about there being such a thing as _too_ many self-defense classes at the rec center, but then he remembers the time he and Al made a would-be mugger cry.

The guy standing above them doesn’t look like a mugger, though; he looks like a walking pillar of pure sleaze.  “Hey, Mustang.”

“Hey, Kimblee,” Roy says.  His voice is calm, but his shoulders aren’t.  Is it fucked-up that Ed can tell?  It’s fucked up that Ed can tell, isn’t it?

“Frank’s parents are out of town,” Sleazy McPurple-Tie says.  “He’s having a little get-together later to celebrate how great that game was—you know, couple people, couple beers, couple games of pool.  A _real_ party; none of this chaperoned mass-of-humanity crap.  You guys in?”

“I couldn’t stay too long,” Roy says.  “I have to stuff to do first thing tomorrow.  But I could stop by for a while.”  He turns to Ed, and his face is so immaculately blank that whiteboard cleaners would be embarrassed.  “You could bring your girlfriend.”

The bark of a laugh gets stuck in Ed’s throat and comes up as a snort with a sort of abominable giggle-chuckle thing on the tail.  “My—my fucking _what_?  You mean _Winry_?  Holy _shit_ , dude, that’s like _incest_.”

There’s a gigantic, bewildering muddle of emotions at war on Roy’s face—like some serious mortars and trenches and strafing shit; it’s _mesmerizing_ —but then he wipes it clean again, like none of the feelings ever happened at all.  “Oh—well, I just—thought.”  He looks up at Scumball the Sanctimonious.  “It’s cool to bring friends, right?”

“Sure,” Kimblee says.  “And don’t get me wrong, but everybody’s pretty fucking interested in this guy.”

He points an indicating finger at…

…Ed?

What the _hell_ , seriously.

“Get ready to be disappointed,” Ed says.  He turns to Roy again.  “You got a ride?”

“Yeah,” Roy says.  “I’ll have to check and see if Andie wants to come, but she probably will.”

“Awesome,” Kimblee says.  “You know Frank’s house?”

“Should I?” Roy says, and his posture is—well, fucking fascinating, to be honest.  The slant of his shoulders and the angle of his torso and the way his eyes somehow seem to get deeper and deeper the longer this conversation goes on—Ed knows a defensive stance when he sees one, _obviously_ , but this is so careful and so subtle and so guarded that it’s kind of… amazing.  Roy doesn’t trust this guy or this situation or even Ed himself, probably, but he’s _damn_ good at making it look like he’s cool as a fucking cucumber on ice.

Meanwhile, Kimblee is shrugging fluidly.  “You know Blackwild Road?”

Ed doesn’t.  Roy nods.

“It’s about halfway down,” Kimblee says.  “I forget the number, but you can’t miss it—the lawn’s, like, a half-acre just in front, and there’s a huge-ass fucking white marble fountain in the middle with Poseidon and a bunch of nymphs.”

This confirms Ed’s suspicion that Kimblee is marginally nerdier than the average high-ranking high school jerk, and most likely significantly smarter.

“Okay,” Roy says.  “We’ll be there.”

“Legit,” Kimblee says.  “Later, Mustang; Backflip.”

He turns on his heel, raising a few curled fingers over his shoulder in a calculatedly half-assed wave, and saunters back up the stairs.

“Did he just nickname me ‘Backflip’?” Ed asks.

“Better than your alternatives,” Roy says.  He’s folded his hands under his chin, and he looks so fucking solemn that they might be at a _wake_ instead of at a stupid dance.  “I heard ‘Goldilocks’ getting thrown around for a couple days.”

A red mist is descending rapidly before Ed’s vision.  “You fucking _shit_ me.”

“Wish I was,” Roy says.  “I don’t think it caught on, though—pretty surprising, actually; there was a thing about ‘This chair is too big… this chair is too big, too… wait, _all_ the damn chairs are too big.’”

“You know anything about law?” Ed asks.

Through the crimson veil of unmitigated rage, he sees Roy blinking at him.  “Say what?”

“Law,” Ed says.  “Specifically, what the sentence is for mass homicide if it’s _justified_.”

Roy grins a little.  “Relax.  It’ll blow over.  Are you sure you want to go to this thing?  It’s just going to be a bunch of douchebag jocks getting shit-faced drunk and acting like assholes.”

“Al’s always saying I need to be socialized,” Ed says.  “Can’t get a better opportunity than this, right?  And anyway, I like to get some firsthand observations of shit like this before I write it off as stupid.”

God, what a dumb thing to say.  _I’m pretty sure hate parties, but I worship at the altar of the scientific method, so I can’t be sure until I’ve tried._

Except Roy’s… smiling?

“All right,” he says.  “We can always cut out after, like, half an hour anyway.  Everyone’ll be so wasted by then that they won’t really notice.”

“Charming,” Ed says.

Roy’s smile twists a little.  “Something like that.”

  


* * *

  


Riza could think of a dozen places to hide a notebook and a small pencil in this impractically capacious dress, but she elected to _try_ to enjoy the evening, so she’s only taking notes in her head.  Memorizing them hasn’t been too difficult, although Maria is making a concerted effort at immense distraction—she looks _stunning_ in green; she’s a vision, a goddess, a sonnet walking, the dress would look even better on Riza’s bedroom carpet, etcetera and so forth.

Roy’s “breather” (Roy does so love his words, and they comfort him, which is why Riza doesn’t bother to say things like “That’s a ridiculous word for a break when you’re already breathing”) has lasted seventeen and a half minutes so far, and Riza has allotted him twenty before she’s going to check on him.  Solf Kimblee was just out there and then back; Edward Elric has been outside for a while now.

Edward Elric is… interesting.  Riza has learned from extensive experience that _understanding_ the endless twining ribbons of social rules streaming through the air around her—and choosing which to intercept and which to avoid—gives her a great deal of power.  Edward, however, doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s standing in the middle of a vortex of shifting, twirling, tightening threads.  No, it’s more than just a lack of realization—he seems to be vaguely aware of the concept, but he honestly doesn’t _care_.

That’s interesting.  And, for all that it’s slightly perilous, it might actually be _good_ for Roy.  He’s toeing the line so closely that he’s bound to sprain something; Edward is sauntering around semi-rhythmically to the beat of a drummer no one else can hear.  Roy is motivated primarily by fear of failure, whereas Edward is driven by what he actually _wants_.  It would be nice to see Roy unwinding at least a little bit, after the way junior year mummified him in his own ambitions.  It would be nice to see him _happy_ again.

But of course it’s not that simple.  Riza would like to say she’d be disappointed if it was, but to be honest, it would be a relief.  She could do with some simplicity once in a while, just for a change.  High school seems to be a four-year slog of everyone doing their damnedest to over-complicate and over-dramatize everything they can get their sticky fingers on.

Riza moves to check her watch only to notice Olivia Armstrong talking to—or perhaps talking at—a parent volunteer, complete with sweeping gestures and an effect of impressive intimidation given that she’s a blonde female under the age of eighteen.  Riza would bet more than just Roy’s last minute of freedom that that’s the herald of the homecoming court brouhaha; she touches Maria’s elbow, gestures towards the door, and slips out around the edge of the crowd.

The problem is that this burgeoning rapport with Edward _would_ be simple if it wasn’t for the way that Roy is looking at him where they’re sitting side-by-side on the front steps down towards the parking lot.

He looks—dazed, by the simple fact of Edward’s existence; blindsided and bewildered and…

Besotted.  He looks _besotted_.

With any luck—and Riza thinks they might have just a smudge—no one else at this esteemed educational establishment knows Roy well enough to make out the constellations of stars in his eyes.  She’ll have to slip a word in and sound out Jean and Heymans; Kain is perceptive enough to have an inkling, so the others would be a better gauge of the pulse of the populace.  If they can’t scent the hormones on him, most of the school will be none the wiser, and Roy’s reputation will be safe and sound until he walks across the front lawn in that sheet of plastic that passes for a graduation gown.

But if it’s detectable—

If anyone else can see the faint tinge of pink in his cheeks, the unprecedented focus of his gaze, the way his shoulder keeps cinching closer to Edward’s—

No power in the world will save him if the others try to drag him down.  He’s too soft and too sensitive; he _cares_ too much.  They’ll shred him like tissue paper in the rain.

“Roy,” she says.

He startles and looks up, shaken out of the worst of it—maybe his instinct for building walls and donning masks might preserve them, as long as no one ever catches him with Edward alone.  Edward… seems to level his defenses without so much as a conscious attempt.  Edward reduces him to the essence of himself, and the essence of Roy is a _fragile_ thing.  It’s a wisp of wonderful spirit that a gust of wind could dissipate—and yes, Edward, in his incalculable confidence, might reinforce it, but at this rate—if he exposes it to the masses and their tearing fingers, their prying eyes—

Roy is the soul-brother Riza never believed in until they met at the top of an evergreen in the park at the age of eight and a half.  And she’ll _kill_ anyone who hurts him, all intentions aside.

“Hey,” Roy says.

“I think they’re about to announce the homecoming court,” she says.

Edward snickers and nudges Roy—gently, just the point of his elbow grazing Roy’s bicep, but there’s an intimacy in that, isn’t there?

“Better go get your swag,” he says.  “Plastic crown oughta suit you.”

“Are you kidding?” Roy asks him.  “There’s a cash prize.”

Edward’s unusual eyes widen.  “Shit, really?  How much?  I should campaign next year or something.”

Roy just looks at him, and keeps looking, and very slowly starts to grin.

“Oh, fuck _you_ ,” Edward says, but he’s trying not to laugh.  “How the hell was I supposed to know?  You _asshole_.  I’m not gonna believe anything you say now.”

“That’s okay,” Roy says.  “I’m never right when I’m trying to be honest, either.”

He’s never spoken in that tone before.  It’s sort of… soft—all mild amusement.  It’s… delicate.

It’s _sweet_.  That’s what it is.

Riza’s not sure whether the looming prospect of retribution or the sudden onset of nausea is worse.  Roy is a pathetic diehard romantic under the thousand shells and layers of uncertainty, and he’s already started to cave.

He’s also levering himself up and dusting off the seat of his pants.  It does not escape Riza’s notice that Edward’s gaze flits towards the progress of his hands.  “I’m coming.  It’d be an unspeakable tragedy if they had to carry on without me.”

“One for the history books,” Edward says, slinging himself up to his feet.

“Or at least the student newspaper,” Roy says.  “Especially after Olivia murders me for drawing attention away from her.”

Riza glares at him when he ostentatiously offers her his arm.  “Let her try.”

“Who’s Olivia?” Edward asks.

“Keep your voice down,” Roy says.  “Nonbelievers burn at the stake.”

“Burning takes too long,” Riza says.  “Guillotining is much more efficient.”  Edward’s eyebrows are disappearing into his bangs as he follows them up the stairs.  “Olivia is the student body president.  She was standing with Roy during that halftime show.”

“Oh,” Edward says.  “Yeah, she did look like she was thirsting after your blood and wouldn’t rest until you were six feet underneath a headstone engraved with the word ‘Fuckhead’.”

“Olivia and I have a complicated relationship,” Roy says.

“Mutually-assured destruction isn’t complicated,” Riza says.

“I like to believe that this town is, in fact, big enough for the two of us,” Roy says.  “Primarily because I’m counting on her moving a thousand miles away when she gets into Harvard.”

“Speaking of which,” Riza says, turning to Edward now, “how is his calculus coming along?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Roy says.  “Ed, don’t answer that.  Riza, come on, we’re _late_ —”

Like the adorable little coward that he is, he breezes past her and darts into the gym again to go collect the satin sash and unwanted attention.

Do people put ‘homecoming royalty’ on their C.V.s for college applications?  Riza isn’t sure if pure popularity is an admissions-friendly commodity, and that one-page real estate might be better allotted to something more academic; Roy has extracurriculars to spare.  She’ll have to look it up and see if there’s some kind of precedent.

This train of thought presumes, of course, that Roy is going to win, because there’s no doubt of that in her mind.  He has the four Ps of high school acclaim on lockdown: he’s pleasant, personable, prominent, and pretty.  He’s also mastered the art of being chill enough not to intimidate ‘the guys’ while balancing confidence and candor in a way that sends heterosexual women falling over themselves.  This school loves Roy Mustang.

They don’t _know_ him, but they love him all the same.

Maybe that’s what Edward has begun to offer—what’s turned Roy into a mostly-ambulant puddle of goo.  Edward, who is completely unimpressed by all of the pressure and pageantry of their insulated little world, has demonstrated a genuine interest in Roy as a _human being_.

Riza watches Edward out of the corner of her vision as the whole silly show goes on, and Roy and Olivia utterly predictably earn their little plastic crowns—Roy’s, of course, will join his sash in the backseat of his car and lie forgotten, collecting dust and odd strains of mold until it’s uncovered by archaeologists a few centuries down the line.

Edward, as he pauses en route to the bleachers, is grinning broadly, and his odd yellow eyes look like they’re lit by candle flames from inside.

He seems harmless enough—but if Roy gets burned, Riza’s going to take him _down_.


	3. Sweeter Than Heaven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …this is the part where Roy starts talking and won't stop because I'm _really bad_ at planning stuff out. This whole thing was supposed to be, like, I dunno, upper limit 8K or something. :'D

The saddest day of Al’s early childhood was the one on which he and Ed finally convinced Mom to take them to the Humane Society and _maybe_ adopt a cat.  There were rooms upon rooms lined with rows upon rows of little wire cages, and all of them— _all_ of them—held beautiful kitties mewing and pawing and snoozing and dreaming and wishing, whether or not they really knew it, for a home.

Al’s eight-year-old heart was so full of love and misery that he thought he was dying, which was why he didn’t notice until the very last little windowless room that he was breaking out in hives.

The sequence of events will be framed in his mind forever, wreathed in the smell of antiseptic and un-petted fur.

He said, “Um, Mom?”

Ed turned, saw, and looked like he’d been shot.

Mom gasped and caught up his arms and said, “Oh, my gosh, sweetie, you’re _so_ allergic—Al—baby, we can’t get a cat.”

If there is a devastation tantamount to eight-year-old heartbreak, Al hasn’t found it yet.

But the really weird thing is that there’s something about Alfons that drags him back there like a black hole suddenly reaching singularity—there’s something about Alfons that powerfully reminds him of soft, precious things trapped in a wire cage, waiting in their tiny cube of darkness for the day they die alone.

And Al would give just about anything to bring him out into the light.

In the meantime, Paninya has found Alfons’s astronomy photography blog on her phone and is scrolling through looking suitably impressed while he points at different pictures and picks out details.  Noah slipped away a few minutes ago to catch up with one of ‘about three people besides Alfons’ who she’d considered a friend here, which leaves…

“Your eyes’ll last longer if you keep them in your head,” Winry says.

“I’ll believe that as soon as you have a degree in optometry to back it up,” Al says.

Winry winks at him.  “She’s _totally_ single, you know.”

Oh, gosh darn it all to heck and _back_ ; Winry thinks he’s got a crush on Paninya.  If he doesn’t defuse this, they could be looking at a heretofore unimaginable quantity of friend-related chaos.

“I was just zoning out,” he says, keeping his voice as calm and level as humanly possible.  “Paninya is a wonderful young lady, but she’s… not my type.  I’d be honored if she’d consider herself my sister, like you.”

That’s a start.  Archaic, fuddy-duddy phrasing; pull the sibling card; relegate the unsuspecting victim to the same category as Winry herself.  It should put her off the scent for a while, but Winry’s persistence is legendary—if she gets the wrong idea and gets it _firmly_ , he could be swapping sinking stories with the _Titanic_ in a matter of days.

Winry is eyeballing him suspiciously.  “Zoning out, my ass.  You had a _distinct_ gleam of love in your eye, Alphonse Elric.”

“Speaking of love,” Al says, “I meant to ask—are you dating anyone?”

“Don’t think I don’t notice you changing the subject,” Winry says, waving as Noah reappears to rejoin them.  “ _Gracelessly_ , I might add.  But since you asked…”

Predictably, Winry has a half-dozen suitors, none of whom are even remotely up to snuff.  Bless her for having such high standards; if she hooked up with a loser, the Elric brothers might well go to prison for murder.

As she’s moving on to number seven (his name is Aaron; he has cute freckles; he has a less-cute tendency towards being unpunctual, which is a cardinal sin in the Novitiate of Love Interesthood), Ed saunters back over with his hands in his pockets, skips up the stairs, and settles down on Al’s other side, the better to nudge at Al’s ribs completely unnecessarily with an elbow.  The slightly violent and completely superfluous body-lingual confirmations of one’s existence are a fact of life with Ed; Al has made his peace with the occasional weird bruises.

“I’m going to a party,” Ed says.

“You’re _what_?” Al and Winry say in rather spectacular unison.

Ed transitions instantaneously from his neutral Statement-of-Fact face to the angry-kitten scowl reserved for I-Hate-You-Guys.  “I can go to a party if I want to.”

“Well,” Winry says, “you _can_ , but… well, Jesus, Ed, you’re pretty much the anti-party animal.”

The scowl deepens into furious-declawed-alley-cat territory.  “I’m glad you think I’m fucking boring.”

“I didn’t _say_ that,” Winry says, rolling her eyes.

“Brother,” Al says, “Winry wouldn’t think that; she knows very well that boring people can’t cause major appliances to burst inexplicably into flames.”

“That only happened _once_ ,” Ed says.

“There was the stove,” Al says, “and then the dryer, a—”

“Okay, _maybe_ three times,” Ed says.  “That could still be a coincidence and not a pattern.  Point _is_ , I’m going to a fucking party, and fuck you for thinking I’m not party material, and—yeah.”

Winry pauses.  “Where is it?”

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “Some guy’s house on Blaghwull Road or some shit.”

“ _Blackwild_?” Alfons cuts in, shifting over.  “That’s the richest street in… definitely the county.  Maybe the whole flipping _state_.”

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Well, I guess Roy knows where it is.”

“You’re going with _Roy_?” Noah asks.

It is then that Ed seems to notice the fact that he is surrounded on literally all sides by disbelieving friends and family members.  He hikes his shoulders up, but his attempts to disappear into his own collar are largely fruitless.

“So the fuck what?” he says.  “He said he’d give me a ride.”

“I’ll _bet_ ,” Paninya says, nudging Noah, who looks half-amused and half-mortified at the thought.

“ _Je_ sus,” Ed says.  “This is why I don’t go out and do shit!  It’s not because I don’t _want_ to; it’s because you guys read me the fucking riot act!”

“And because you don’t want to,” Al says.

“Shut up,” Ed says, which is not even remotely the same thing as ‘No’.  “Whatever.  The guy said I can bring friends, but apparently I don’t _have_ any, so you all can just go home and stare at the wall and think about what fucking jerks you are.”

“Like I said,” Paninya says, “the only party on my agenda is the raiding one expecting me in a couple hours.  Like hell am I Leroy Jenkins-ing those guys; they’re awesome.”

“I didn’t realize that was a verb,” Al says.

“It’s not,” Alfons says.  “And it doesn’t make sense in that context; standing them up and Leroy Jenkins-ing them should be two entirely different th—”

“I hate you _all_ ,” Paninya says.

“What’d _I_ do?” Winry asks.

“Good point,” Paninya says.  “I hate men.”

“Reasonable,” Noah says, dropping her chin into both hands.  “No offense, guys.”

“None taken,” Al and Alfons say.

“In that case,” Ed says, “I hate women.”

“I noticed,” Paninya says, elbowing Noah again.

Ed looks confused, which is Ed’s least-favorite feeling in the whole human spectrum of emotion—which means he’s confused and _annoyed_ about it.  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Winry sighs and flips her hair over one shoulder.  “It means Paninya thinks you should hook up with the hot quarterback guy.”

The confusion melts into scandalized amazement.  “Are you _high_?”

Paninya looks at the bleachers around them and strokes at her chin.  “Eh.  This isn’t more than ten feet.  I’d say that puts me at sorta low- to mid-range.”

Ed is staring at her.

“It was a joke,” Paninya says.

“I got that,” Ed says.  “This isn’t me not understanding; this is me wondering how you’ve made it this far in life without anybody hitting you in the head with a two-by-four.”

Paninya beams at him.  “What makes you think nobody has?”

“Oh, jeez, you guys,” Winry says, holding her open hands up between them.  Her face softens a little, and she pokes Ed in the shoulder with about as much affection as the gesture can possibly convey.  “Are you sure it’s going to be—I dunno— _safe_?”

Ed shrugs.

Winry rounds on Al.  “Are you going to go with him?”

He probably should.  Letting an unattended Edward Elric strike out into a social situation is rather like encouraging a lit match to wander into a dry forest.

But it’s late, and Al’s nerves are beginning to fray as the borders of his personal space grate against the sheer volume of people, and the mediocre music’s resonating bass is pounding in his skull.

Winry is still looking at him expectantly.

“Um,” he says.  “I… guess I could…”

“I don’t need a fucking babysitter, _Win_ ,” Ed says.

“Besides,” Alfons says.  “Al’s more or less a freshman.  They might not even let him in.”

“That’s classist,” Al says.

Bless that battered heart, Alfons gets the joke and smiles faintly.

“Whatever,” Ed says.  “Just tell Mr. Hughes I’ll be back later.  And don’t tell him where the thing is, or he might feel obligated to bust it up.”

“Yeah,” Alfons says thoughtfully.  “Sometimes I think cop _and_ dad is a bad combination.”

“Elysia’s first boyfriend is going to have to be pretty brave,” Noah says.

“Or her first girlfriend,” Paninya says brightly.

The funny twist to Ed’s mouth doesn’t escape Al’s notice—then again, not much does.

  


* * *

  


Oh, God.  Roy is about to put Ed Elric and Andie Peterson in his car at the same time.  Sure, it’s a hell of a durable car, but the collision of these two personalities in close quarters could have the destructive power of an atom bomb.

He gazes mournfully at his trusty chariot as they head across the parking lot towards its majestically boxy silhouette.

_It was nice knowing you,_ he thinks at it, very sincerely.  _We had some good times.  I hope you remember them in car heaven._

He’s trying not to think about what’s going to happen to the likes of _him_ when Ed and Andie intersect and explode.

“Damn,” Ed says as they get close.  “That’s not a station wagon; that’s a _tank_.  You could fit, like, three dead bodies in the back of that thing.”

“Always with the corpses,” Roy says.

“ _Eew_ ,” Andie says—but way less enthusiastically than Roy expected, and she’s not keeping a safe distance from Ed like the Nerdiness is contagious… Is there a minuscule chance they won’t fight to the death?

“Or refugees!” Ed says, peering through the back window.  “You could make a false bottom for the trunk and smuggle people—like, some Scarlet Pimpernel shit.”

That’s a combination of words Roy never dared to dream he’d hear.

Despite the pronounced disadvantage of her sky-high heels, Andie makes it to the passenger side first while Ed is still musing over ways to pimp(ernel) Roy’s ride.  Presumably calling shotgun is gauche, but simply _stealing_ it is acceptable.

Ed barely seems to notice; when Roy unlocks everything, he slides into the backseat and twists around to examine the space some more.  “You could make a trebuchet and carry it around.  Then if anybody fucked with you, you could just stop the car and assemble it and launch ’em into the stratosphere.  Best road rage _ever_.”

Andie shoots Roy what she seems to think is a conspiratorial look as he guns the engine.  “Would it be worth the jail time, though?” she asks.

“I dunno,” Ed says calmly, buckling his seatbelt, while Roy fumbles for coherent syllables and comes up empty-handed.  “Is underage drinking worth the chance of juvie?  Wait, no, you’re a senior, right?  You might get tried as an adult.  And I guess the guy hosting could probably get slammed with distribution, huh?”

Andie contorts around the edge of her seat to look at him.  “You’re a _gymnast_ , Ed.  Don’t try to convince me _you_ don’t think danger can be exciting.”

Ed snickers.  “Breaking my _own_ neck’s still legal.”

“What _ever_ ,” Andie says—which, as everyone in their age bracket knows, is Teenager for _I concede the point and forfeit_.  She touches Roy’s arm, which is both unnecessary and distracting when he’s trying to drive in the dark while exhausted, with two perilous dynamos in the vehicle.  “Frank’s is on Blackwild, right?”

“That’s right,” Roy says.  “I’d be happy to drive you home later.”

“Jesus,” Ed says.  “You’re straight-up… gallant.  That’s Al’s word; I don’t even know what it means except by context or whatever.”

Roy’s face is on fire.  Good damn thing it’s so dark.  “Um… Thank you?”

“Sure,” Ed says.

Lucky, too, that the drive isn’t especially long.  And that it’s too dim, and he’s too focused on the road, to catch sight of the way Ed’s hair gleams like gold ore in low light, the way his eyes sharpen like facets laser-cut into a gemstone; the way he moves like a cat, with every muscle shifting at once, in perfect complement, to lend him an absolutely mesmerizing sort of grace.

This is without a doubt the most agonizing thing that has happened to Roy in… well, a _long_ time.  At least since that morning in middle school where Mom banged on the door while he was in the shower and cordially suggested he find a place to whack off that didn’t involve using all the hot water.

“Keep an eye out for a big fountain on the lawn,” he says.  “Apparently we can’t miss it.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” Ed says.

“Look at all the cars,” Andie says.  “It must be right here.”

Sure enough, the street is lined with vehicles of varying type, cost, and quality, although a common theme is _not a beat-up Volvo from the early ’90s_ , so Roy figures he’ll just do his best to tuck his faithful friend into an unobtrusive corner somewhere and hope that the rich people don’t throw quail eggs at it to punish him for trespassing.

Ed steps out of the car, shuts the door, and pauses.  He’s shoved his hands into his pockets, and he looks up at the illuminated mansion-house and its sprawling lawn with his head tilted and his forehead slightly furrowed, like the whole thing just doesn’t make sense.

“What do you do?” he asks.

“What do you mean?” Roy asks as he gets Andie’s door and earns himself a little bit of fluttering-eyelash action.

Instead of withdrawing one of his hands from a pocket, Ed indicates the house with a pop of his shoulder.  “All that space.  What do you _do_ with it?  Like, how many rec rooms and parlors and shit can you _have_?  Doesn’t most of it just sorta sit there most of the time?”

“Well, sure,” Andie says—which is good; fuck knows Roy doesn’t have an answer.  “That’s why you have parties—so you get a ton of people in and use it all.”

Ed blinks at her, then at the house again.  “Huh.”

One of the principles of Roy’s high-school-bound existence—and, if he’s honest, probably one of the saving graces that’s preserved his sanity—is devout adherence to the mantra _Don’t think about it too much_.  Ed doesn’t seem to have arrived at that workaround yet, and he’s so stubborn he likely never will.  It’s too bad, really; it’s spared Roy a _hell_ of a lot of grief over the years.

“Shall we?” he asks.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Andie says, linking her elbow with his.  “Come on!”

He knows it’s crazy, but he can’t help wanting to offer his other arm to Ed—wouldn’t it be grand?  Just… knowing what it would feel like.  Having those extraordinary muscles pressed along his forearm; those clever, ink-and-graphite-smeared fingers woven in with his—that’s all.  Just to find out what it’s like to touch him.  Just to have the searing intensity of his full focus for a _fraction_ of a moment—

Roy’s not exactly spiritual, but it really seems like… there’s just something _about_ Ed that’s faintly… _otherworldly_ , and Roy can’t help thinking that being the center of his attention would be… transcendent, somehow.

Jesus, that’s stupid.  Jesus, _he’s_ stupid.  Jesus, he’s so… fucking… far _gone_.

It’s okay.  It’s fine.  He’s just got a little bit of a weird, counter-preference crush.  It’s probably mostly just because Ed is brilliantly smart and staggeringly talented—two things Roy aspires to, for the record; it’s no surprise that the combination of boundless mental energy and incredible physical control is inspiring and sort of… enthralling.  It’s just that Roy _admires_ him—that’s all—and Ed is such an odd duck in general that Roy’s feelings on the whole matter are understandably getting muddled.  That’s what it is.  It’s totally normal.  It’s totally safe.

Oh, _God_ , he’s got a gorgeous blonde girl on his arm, and he’s looking at Ed’s ass.

It’s really very unfortunate that he’s been elected, albeit by default, as the designated driver; a drink might take the edge off of the panic.  He can’t be—he’s not—well, there’s no harm in being _attracted_ , is there?  And of course an unprecedented situation is throwing him for a loop, and of course he’s reacting poorly; he needs to settle down, accept the facts, and start rolling with the punches.  There’s nothing _wrong_ with having a weird, overwhelmingly powerful interest in Ed—he’s not one of _those_ guys; like, when it comes to Riza and Maria, he thinks it’s awesome, because they’re awesome for each other, and who the fuck cares if they’re both chicks.

It’s just that he never… even… considered… that it might happen to _him_.  And somehow that feels different from the general principle of _other_ people’s feelings and _other_ people’s lives.

Shit.  Does that make him a fucked-up bigot asshole?  It’s a double-standard, right?  And that’s where prejudice thrives, isn’t it—in the little holes and pockets of hypocrisy, where hate can breed and cruelty festers.  This is how it starts—with _fear_.

So what the hell is he supposed to do?  Look himself in the mirror and loudly proclaim that he’s allowed to have gay crushes on guys who think he’s a stupid tool anyway, and keep repeating it until he believes himself?  The only life-changing revelation that that’s going to facilitate is a discovery of what amazingly awkward questions his mom is capable of asking when she overhears.

They’re only just starting up the lawn, and he already wants to go home.  If a day comes when burying his head under the covers and pretending that the world doesn’t exist ceases to be comforting, he’ll eat his hat.

…he doesn’t have a particular hat in mind, but he’ll pick one if the need arises.

“I guess everybody’s inside,” Andie says.  She huddles closer to Roy’s arm, and he distinctly feels some fantastic boob press.  Good to know he hasn’t _completely_ lost his appreciation for the female form.  “It is kind of cold.”

“Yeah,” he says—just another instance in a long line of demonstrations of his scintillating wit.

“Grow a pair,” Ed says.  “I mean, not _you_ —” This to Andie.  “Girl dresses are fucking ridiculous for any kind of weather.  Big football hero over there gettin’ all prissy the second there’s a breeze, is what I meant.”

“Poetic,” Roy says.  “Good point, though.”  He looks to Andie.  “Would you like to borrow my coat?  I really don’t mind.”

“ _Je_ sus,” Ed says before she can respond.  He pauses in trekking up the lawn ahead of them in order to turn and pointedly roll his eyes.  “Al would love you; you’re a walking ’30s musical cliché.  All you need is a sweeping soundtrack and a tap number.”

“I couldn’t tap to save my life,” Roy says.  The next words almost stick in his throat—almost stop themselves and save him—but then they slither free.  “Maybe you could show me.”

Ed, pinnacle of beauty, idol of grace… snorts vehemently.

“Tap and swing are like Arabic and French,” he says.  “Sure, they’re both languages, but being conversational in one doesn’t mean you can do jackshit more than ask for the fucking bathroom in the other.”

“I thought maybe you’d studied both,” Roy says.  Andie is looking at him a touch oddly, and he can’t blame her; his head seems to be spinning so much that he half expects it to pop off of his neck and go rolling through the grass.

Ed gives him a long look and then stalks off up the path again.  “Never said I didn’t.  Just didn’t want you making any false fucking equivalencies, is all.”

He’s a dancer and a gymnast and a genius and a goddamn _tease_ , and is it really any wonder Roy’s obsessed?

“I could teach you some pretty good cheer moves, you know,” Andie says.

“It wouldn’t be easy,” Roy says.  “I tend to have a problem with rhythm.”  That’s a charitable way of expressing his basic incompatibility with the very _concept_ of a beat.

“You don’t seem like the kind of guy who backs down from a challenge,” Andie says airily, looking ahead.  “Maybe you just have to show rhythm who’s boss.”

“That sounds like it would probably end in broken instruments and tears,” Roy says.

Andie rolls her eyes, but there’s not much more time to struggle to emulate Hollywood banter—they’ve reached the wide-open double doors that lead into Frank Archer’s family’s incredibly monstrous home.

He tries to pay attention to the people who immediately split off from the crowd in the swanky living room to come and meet them—half of them clap his shoulder and tell him what a good game it was the other night, as though they give a crap about the _quality_ of the game, not just the fact that their team won.

And it’s weird—it’s _terrifying_ , really—but all Roy’s skittering brain and pulsing blood seem to care about is where Ed’s gone.  Even as he smiles at people and regurgitates jokes and recites conversation, his eyes are tracking the corners of the rooms, scouring the edges of the hallways, flicking into shadows, striving for a glimpse of gold set off with blue—

Where the hell did he _go_?

“Welcome to my humble abode, Mustang,” Archer says, swaggering over in typical style, arms outstretched and eyes completely insincere.  “Andie, you look unbelievable.  I might have to duel him to the death to win your favor.”

“Or you could get me a drink,” Andie says.  “Nice place, by the way.”

Archer winks, and every single molecule of Roy’s body whispers _Sleeeeeeeeeaze_.

“Are you sure you trust the drinks here?” he asks Andie very, very quietly as Archer schmoozes off towards the bastion of overhead light and expensive marble countertops where all the bottles are gleaming.

“This is a big enough thing that it’s probably okay,” Andie says.  She squeezes Roy’s arm and grins up at him.  “Besides, you’ll protect my honor, right?”

“Does that need saying?” Roy asks.

She beams at him, and _Lord_ if she doesn’t have the cutest dimples this side of Cupid’s nuclear family—

Archer and his death-pale hands are back, pushing royal blue Solo cups at them.  Didn’t anyone ever tell him that sketchy party booze has to be served in the _red_?  Roy always figured that was the first rule in the _Illegal Underage Party_ book.

“I got you one, too, Mustang,” Archer says.  “Can’t let the lady drink alone.”

Andie does a… _thing_ —it’s more than just smiling coyly over the rim of her cup; it’s _complicated_ ; it involves a tiny flash of teeth and gazing through eyelashes and about a thousand other tiny muscle movements Roy can’t even chronicle.  It’s kind of amazing, really.

“Thanks,” Roy says to Archer in the nick of time before the beat of silence becomes a pause—pauses breed awkwardness; awkwardness is the beginning of the end.  “But I’m driving.”

“You can have _one_ ,” Archer says.  “What do you weigh, one-sixty?  It’ll be way through you by the time you get in the car.”

He’s going to get Roy’s knuckles way through his _face_ if he doesn’t back down.  “Nah, it’s cool.  I’d really rather not.”

Andie reaches up and pinches his cheek, which is—horrible.  It’s horrible.  He gathers from context clues that it was probably supposed to be cute.  “He’s so _virtuous_.”

Roy is trying to wriggle away without looking like he’s trying wriggle away.  It’s harder than he expected.  “Well, I… try.”

Andie starts snuggling with his arm, which is significantly less objectionable.  “He’s like my white knight.”

“Except Asian,” Archer says.

“ _God_ , Frank,” Andie says.  “It’s always a race thing with you, isn’t it?”

“You started it,” Archer says, but he’s grinning, and there’s none of the trademark, freaky, turn-your-guts-to-jello frigidity in his eyes for once.  “Whatever—guess you’ll just have to drink Mustang’s share, too, Andie.”

She releases Roy’s arm to take the second cup in her free hand.  “Challenge accepted.”

“ _Mustang_!” is the only warning before a heavy hand lands on Roy’s shoulder.  “Glad you made it—and it’s Andie, right?”

There’s a bizarre game of musical Solo cups while Andie tries to free up a hand for a handshake (somehow, Roy ends up with one, and Archer with the other), and an even stranger moment where Kimblee sabotages the shake in favor of kissing Andie’s knuckles lightly.

“Uh oh,” Andie says, angling an eyebrow at Roy.  “You’ve got competition in the chivalry contest.”

Roy is obligated to grin and swagger.  “Bring it on.”

“I’ll obliterate you,” Kimblee says, so calmly that Roy’s stomach executes a somersault so swift and intricate that Ed would seethe with jealousy.  “Frank, are you giving her the _cheap_ liquor?”

“Mid-range,” Archer says.  “Don’t give me that crap, Kimblee; _you’re_ not paying for it.”

“Neither are you,” Kimblee says.

“Hey, have you met Juliet?” Archer asks Andie.  “She’s on the dance team.”

Andie bats her eyelashes in what seems to be a grateful sort of way at Roy as she takes her drink back.  “We don’t usually mingle with the likes of _them_.”

Roy’s social instincts are failing him: he’s spiraling out of control towards _certain_ destruction.  He can’t figure out whether nervous laughter or stony silence is less uncouth and ends up stranded in between them, and this is the start of the terrible slide towards the precipice—

He can’t panic.  If he panics, he’s lost.  He can wrangle this back under control; he’s not _that_ pathetic; he can salvage the nosedive and turn it into a graceful swoop, can’t he?

Shit.  It’s like trying to walk on thin ice coated with eggshells in front of a panel of judges.  Graduation can’t come soon _enough_.

“I’m kidding,” Andie says.  “I’d love to meet her.”

Archer’s swilling the spare drink and looking around.  “Speaking of people _I_ want to get acquainted with, where’d that Elric kid go?  I thought you said he was here.”

“Ed?” Andie asks.  “He came with us.”

_There_ are the creepy, glassy Archer eyes that everybody knows and no one loves.  “What’s he like?”

“I dunno,” Andie says with an elegant sort of half-shrug thing that makes her dress gleam.  “I think he’s one of those people who’s so smart it sort of broke their brain a little bit.  He’s always just sort of… glaring… at stuff that’s totally normal, like he’s trying to understand it or something.  But if you can kind of get used to him, he’s actually sort of nice.  It’s weird.”

Kimblee looks fascinated, in a way that makes Roy’s spine go cold.  “You mean he’s some kind of idiot savant or something?”

“I wouldn’t go _that_ far,” Andie says, sipping at her drink.  “Just… It’s like he’s got so much super-genius stuff going on in his brain that it’s overloaded his ability to filter, I dunno.  He just always says exactly what he’s thinking, no matter how weird or rude it is.  Once you get used to it, it’s kind of great—if _you’re_ thinking something weird or rude, he just… comes out with it.  And it’s not that he’s _mean_ , just that he’s… blunt.  ’Cause he doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.”  Her smile thins and takes on a level of sincerity Roy wasn’t really expecting.  “I guess I kind of admire that.”

Archer raises an eyebrow.  “Isn’t it sort of fucked up to have a _guy_ on the cheer team?  I mean, does he, like… share the locker room?  And _stare_ at you and shit?”

“ _No_ ,” Andie says.  “Are you serious?  That’d be a lawsuit faster than you could say ‘half the team’s parents are corporate attorneys’.  And I really don’t think he does.  He doesn’t really seem to… register it, I dunno.  It’s the same sort of thing; it always seems like he just has more important things to think about.”

“Interesting,” Kimblee says, in a tone of voice most people reserve for complimenting the flavor of a criminally decadent chocolate cake.

“I should probably make sure he’s not annihilating himself,” Roy says—not the smoothest segue he’s ever conjured, but it’ll do.  He looks to Andie.  “Are you going to be all right?”

“We’ll take good care of her,” Archer says.

Roy eyes him.  Masking the majority of the real venom to play it off as a _this-is-my-date-hands-off_ suspicion is a challenge worthy of his skills.

Andie rolls her eyes and elbows him gently.  “God, Roy, you’re so old-fashioned.  It’s _fine_.  This ain’t my first rodeo, you know.”

_That doesn’t mean you can’t get thrown and break your neck,_ Roy thinks, but if he lets that metaphor go limping on, it’ll almost certainly end in Mustang jokes.

“Okay, okay,” he says instead.  “I’ve got my phone.”

Andie makes a shooing motion.  “Just _go_.  Have some fun for once, if you even know how.”

“I know how to have fun,” he says indignantly.

If the faint smirk is any indication, she’s unconvinced.

Well—whatever.  He’s pretty curious about where Ed ended up.

…that’s the grossest, saddest, most egregious understatement in the unabridged history of his pitiful little life.

He’s _dying_ to know where Ed went—there’s a frantic beat of desperation in his blood; he _needs_ to know; he needs to know Ed’s _okay_.  By coming here, by sanctioning this, by driving, by making it _possible_ , he tossed his favorite kitten into a den of wolves.  And his heart is straining against his ribs trying to get _closer_ —his eyes are glancing into every corner, trying to zero in on the precise arc of the golden ponytail; his fingers are curling into helpless fists, and his skin is heating; his brain is _whirring_ , hyper-aware and tipping towards anxiety.  He wants to be able to sense Ed’s presence; he wants to see a blinding bright red aura; he wants the magnetism to drag him in like there are a dozen steel cords knotted around his ribs.  He just wants to _be_ there.  He just wants to be part of how Ed, in all his brilliance, in all his ‘bluntness’, in all of his _Ed_ -ness, experiences the world.

This is so fucked up.  This is _so_ fucked up, and he’s _so_ fucked; he’s never felt this kind of _fever_ before; he’s known this kid for less than _five weeks_ , and sure, Ed’s weirdly engrossing; sure, he’s pretty fucking unique, but he’s not a _god_.  There’s nothing supernatural about him, and nothing concrete that should make Roy feel like _this_.  It’s a constant throbbing in the center of him, this _thing_ —this absolute conviction that Ed’s extraordinary, that he should be _worshiped_ , that Roy should be _honored_ to have the _chance_ —

And it hurts.

And he’s going to fight it for everything he’s fucking worth.

Because it’s not— _right_.  That’s nothing to do with the—whatever, gay factor; that doesn’t _matter_.  The problem is the _power_ of it.

The problem is that Roy fucking Mustang shouldn’t be reduced to _abjection_.

What the hell _is_ this, anyway?

The feeling, he means, the _consumption_ —not the clump of kids shushing each other, clustered around a coffee table; that’s the result of a Ziplock bag of _something_ that some vaguely benevolent college-aged sibling bequeathed, which could be any number of more or less illicit substances.  He’s no stranger to fire in his guts and butterflies flirting with the tongues of flame; and _his_ tongue is no stranger to Gordian knots and helpless stammerings.  He’s yearned and dreamed and wallowed in his misery straight through the night; he’s written out annotated novels full of fantasies in his heart’s best penmanship, with warming blood for ink, and stood vigil all the livelong day for glimpses of the object of his adulation.

But this—

This is—

Deeper.

Worse.

This is a terrifying, broken thing.  This is _surrender_.

Roy’s never given up in his life, but this war’s already wracked the cityscapes and strafed the fields, and all is lost.

He has to find Ed.  And at the same time, holy _shit—_ he’d rather leap from a cliff face and spread his arms and pray for flight; he likes those odds much better for success.

He’s not going down like this.

He’s _not_.

He’s going to meet this thing head-on and shatter it to _pieces_ , and then he’s going to pick himself up and keep moving, because he _has to_.  He has to get through this; he has to get _out_ of here; he has to _be_ something, _become_ something, that justifies all of the bullshit he waded through to get to it.  He has to make his mom glad she lost her mind just long enough to take in her dead brother’s stupid kid; he has to counterbalance all the crap he uses and abuses and destroys as part of being on this dumbass planet; he has to justify all the energy that other people have poured into him, all the love and dedication and commitment that he’s hardly ever given them a reason for—

And he can’t _do_ that if he’s distracted by how gooey his insides go when he even _thinks_ about a swinging golden ponytail and the drape of matching bangs and a fine, fine, _fine_ , athletic ass.

He can’t afford to let this beat him, whatever the fuck it is.  He has to be more than this.  He has to be _stronger_ than it.


	4. Hotter Than Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please accept my formal apology for the fact that this cliffhanger is actually _worse_ than the last one. ;__; I've started work on the the next part, but… yeah, my life is a shambles, and I've learned not to make promises. :c

Roy starts down a hallway that has light and sound streaming from the far end, and the prickling, deep-set desire to find Ed—just to _see_ him—pirouettes in little lightning bursts like static electricity underneath his skin.

He thinks he hears the particular inflections of Ed’s flat, dismissive disinterest—and Andie was right, wasn’t she?  It’s not hostile; there’s nothing cruel about him.  He just doesn’t understand.  He can’t relate.  He’s too fucking _special_ ; that’s the simple fact of it.

Well—so _what_?  He’s still just a guy.  He’s still just some _kid_ , and Roy’ll be _damned_ before he’ll give in to this twisting, seething flare of hungry _want_ that keeps on circling like a vulture in his chest.

He squares his shoulders, draws a breath, and forges the fuck in there.

He will not be intimidated.  He will not be beaten.  He will not fall apart.

He _won’t_.

Ed’s loitering near a huge bowl of pretzels, rolling one between his fingertips, and he’s got one of those stupid blue Solo cups in the other hand.  How much as he _had_?  It’s not quite enough to take the edge off of his antisocial tendencies, by the looks of it; half a dozen people have gathered around him, but he bears much more of a resemblance to a cornered animal than to the effusive storyteller they seem to be looking for.  Roy recognizes most of the audience—they run the gamut for team sports; unsurprisingly, for Archer’s party, most of them are lacrosse meatheads, but there’s a water polo guy and a few track and field girls who he seems to recall are pretty nice.

Or maybe not—one of them is eyeing Ed like he’s a hunk of kobe beef that she’d like to grill until he’s nice and juicy, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

What the hell is he thinking?  He has no right, no claim, and no fucking _brain cells_.  He’s in no position to judge.

Ed’s backed up next to a couch, with a big lamp between him and the sliding glass door out to the patio, and there’s a slant to his shoulders that seems uncomfortable and almost defensive, maybe.  Roy’s heart leaps and crumples at the same instant; it’s _tinfoil_ in Ed’s hands, and he doesn’t even know—and Roy doesn’t even know _why_ —

Ed’s gaze darts to him, and there’s a delicate bloom of something like… relief.  Like he has an ally.  Like he feels the slightest bit safer just having Roy across the room.

Roy has to stop this.  He has to stop projecting; he has to stop assigning feelings, and meaning; he has to kill the stupid, impossible, absolutely profitless hope before it destroys _him_.  He could impale himself on this.  His heart seems determined to try.  And this is the worst shoal _imaginable_ to wreck his ship upon when he’s so close to victory.

Captain Mustang is _not_ —

All right, this whole noble metaphor shit is starting to sound stupid even in his own head.  He’s got to get a _grip_.

“It’s really not that exciting, though,” Ed is saying, and it’s funny—he just doesn’t _quite_ seem to make eye contact with most people most of the time.  Has Ed been looking at Roy’s forehead or the bridge of his nose all this time, and he just never noticed?  “It’s just… like any other sport, I guess.  I guess maybe it’s not the same as team sports.  I dunno.  This is the first team-y thing I’ve done.”

He’s not teamy; _Roy_ is teem _ing_ —with all of this overflowing, unnecessary, unhelpful emotion that he just can’t dam up inside himself—

“Do a flip,” the girl who’s sizing up his edibility says.

Ed looks at her like she’s crazy, and that marks an even one occasion that Roy couldn’t argue with his choice in a social situation.

“Yeah,” one of the lacrosse guys takes up.  “C’mon, it must be easy for you.  You could teach us.”

“Not _here_ ,” Ed says.  “I mean, I couldn’t teach you here—’cause like fuck am I getting blamed when you all break your necks and bleed out all over this nice-ass carpet—and I couldn’t do a real fucking flip here, either, ’cause there’s all these tables and shit in the way, and I’d break _my_ neck.”

The girl dips her head to look into her drink, the better to raise her eyes again and look up at Ed—which is not an easy task, it must be said—through her eyelashes.  “There’s got to be _something_ you can show us, isn’t there?”

Ed is immune to feminine wiles.  Ed doesn’t even seem to register their presence in this room, despite the fact that the perfume of the pheromones is practically choking all of the other males.

“Meh,” he says, swilling his Solo cup.  He crams the pretzel in his mouth and then speaks through it.  “I guess there’s a little space…”

“Lemme hold your drink,” the girl says.

Ed half-shrugs and hands it to her.  “Thanks.  Okay, watch fuckin’ close, ’cause I’m only gonna do this once.”

In less than the blink of an eye, the phones come out.

Ed rolls his eyes.  “Fuckin’ _A_ , you guys.”

And does he glance at Roy, or is that just the fiction in Roy’s brain fanning its greedy fingers over his very fucking _eyes_?  Is he seeing things now, in the throes of this obsession?

There’s no time to think about it, even if he wanted to—Ed plants both palms on the carpet, inverts himself, and walks on his hands all he way across the room.  It’s not the straightness of his body and the casual angle of his feet in the air that stops Roy’s throat; it’s not the graceful swiftness of his progress; it’s not even the beautiful curve of his beautiful ass.

It’s the fact that his dress shirt starts to slide, and his _skin_ —

Roy can see angry tangles of scar tissue from here, but his _abs_ are like something out of a fucking _dream_ —

Oh, God.

Oh, God, it’s over, isn’t it?  It’s too fucking late.  Roy Mustang is a dead man, justly slain by long blond hair and drool-worthy glutes and little wiggly integral signs scrawled on binder paper with their faces so close their breath mingles and Ed’s eyes are _huge_.

Ed’s back arcs smoothly until his feet touch the ground—that should look painful, but it’s so _lovely_ —and then he’s popping upright and planting his hands on his hips.

“Okay,” he says.  “That was ‘something’.  Can I have my drink back?”

He crosses back to the group, and the girl hands it to him, and he raises it to his lips, and Roy becomes very fucking interested in the nearest couch so that he doesn’t get caught staring at Ed’s mouth.

“That was _amazing_ ,” the girl is saying.

“Not really,” Ed says.  “I’m out of practice.”

“You must be beyond amazing, then,” the girl says, and Roy wants to pick her up by her shoulders, carry her down the hall, and deposit her in another room where she _can’t flirt with Ed_.

It’s pathetic of him even to imagine that—it’s five-year-old thinking.  _If I can’t gush over him out loud, no one else should be able to, either_.

He chances a glance, fearing the worst, only to find Ed staring at his admirer like she’s an extraterrestrial staggering around asking for directions to Roswell.

“…uh,” Ed says.  “I dunno.”

Turns out Roy might as well be drunk: his brain starts to skitter, and his thoughts start to blend, and the night starts to blur.

The weekend after he turned sixteen, his mother battened down the house, brought out her best selection of the hard stuff for him, popped a bottle of port for herself, put on a season of vintage Doctor Who, and hung out with him while he got so wasted he’d blacked out by midnight.  He woke up in his bed—which was sort of miraculous, given how much muscle weight he’d put on; but then, nothing had ever stood between Chris Mustang and an objective and lived to tell the tale—when she walked into his room with a tray of breakfast.  Over some scrambled eggs and bacon that was alternately tantalizing him half to death and making him want to vomit up every organ in his body, they quite rationally discussed the various and sundry reasons why drinking himself into oblivion could be both dangerous and unpleasant, basic illegality aside.

The point is that he knows how hasty, heedless intoxication feels, and it’s a damn lot like just _looking_ at Ed.

Somebody leads them over into a rec room that could contain about three-quarters of Roy’s house, and which is furnished with _two_ pool tables—all clean felt and gleaming wood with brass accents, like they’re straight off the set of a James Bond movie.  Somehow Ed’s acquired a _different_ Solo cup; this one’s red like that stupid sweatshirt he always wears, and when he lifts it to his mouth and grins around it, his eyes—sparkle.  They fucking _sparkle_.  No two fucking ways about it.

Roy hates everything.  Especially the universe.  Which seems to hate him back.

“Okay,” Ed says to Roy as they very predictably immediately get dragged into a game.  “So fill me in on how this works.”

“You’ve never played?” Roy asks.

“Oh, ex _cuse_ me,” Ed says, smirking now.  Every different smile he whips out of his arsenal is like another fucking bayonet blade jabbing into the meat of Roy’s heart.  “Sorry I don’t do super posh shit in my copious fucking spare time.”

“Don’t worry,” Roy says, chalking the cue and offering it to him.  “It’s just physics and geometry and a little bit of strategy.  You’ll be killer.”

Ed pauses, and then he rounds up totally new smile every bit as sharp as all its predecessors, and his eyebrow arcs.  “Oh, yeah?”

“Well,” Roy says, “I mean… probably.  You’re good at a lot of stuff.”

Oh, God, he wants to smother himself with one of the tasseled throw pillows perched temptingly over on the couch.  The girls sitting there probably wouldn’t miss _one_ , would they?  Maybe someone could return it to its regular position after he asphyxiated.

“Whatever,” Ed says.  “So show me what the fuck I’m supposed to do.”

This is the delicate part—this is where Roy would almost rather be defusing a bomb despite his absolute lack of explosives training.  This is the part where he has to strike the razor-edged balance between _no-homo-totally-legit-dude_ necessary physical contact and _overcompensatingly-no-homo not-even-touching-you-man_.

Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in the locker room has teetered on that blade, and, like with most person-reading sorts of shit, Roy usually has a pretty good knack for it.

But he always had the advantage, in those situations, that every nerve in his entire body wasn’t straining towards the guy he was about to touch.

This is like playing on an ‘Operation’ board with the batteries on the fritz; he can’t stop tensing, waiting for the blare of the alarm, as he reaches out and gently, gently, _oh God_ —draws Ed’s elbow back—takes his wrist—sets his right hand high on the cue, gestures at him to set the other closer to the tip—

“You want to line up your shot,” he says.  Ed’s shoulder is radiating tension; _God_ , he could lay his hands against the smooth lines of the muscles and knead out all the knots.  “You can only actually hit the white ball—that’s the cue ball—and you’re trying to transfer the force from it in order to get either the striped balls or the solid ones into the pockets.  Depends on who gets one in first; that becomes their team’s kind.  Any pocket’ll do, and if you get one in, you get another shot.  If you accidentally get the cue ball in a pocket, the other team gets to take it and put it wherever on the table that they want—otherwise, you can’t touch anything except your stick.  And the 8-ball has to be the last one that you pocket no matter which team you’re on.”

“Huh,” Ed says.  “I always figured it was more complicated than that.”

“They wouldn’t play it in bars if it was complicated,” Roy says, speaking from a wealth of experience too vast to quantify.

“Yeah, see your point,” Ed says, leaning in towards the table, all sharp amber eyes.  “It’s really just math.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Roy says.  They’re too close.  They’re _too close_ ; who the hell’s idea was this?  “Unless you just got a ball in, the turns alternate.”

Ed’s eyes never leave the felt; he’s scanning the angles of the corners and examining the tip of his cue.  “Teams and players both, right?”

“Right,” Roy says.

“So you and I gotta coordinate.”  He’s speaking more to the table than to Roy, but as he leans lower still, the curve of his _ass_ —

Shit, shit, _shit_.  Roy’s so screwed he could open a hardware store; he has to think of something else— _anything_ else—

He thinks the game will distract him, but it actually makes things worse—he and Ed operate like two cogs in the same clock, cut to fit.  Ed’s eyes somehow keep getting brighter, like he’s on a dimmer switch gone haywire; every time he bends and folds his body along the cue to make a shot, it takes every iota of Roy’s willpower to look at anything but his gorgeous fucking ass; again and again, he moves his hands slowly and deliberately, but there’s a deftness and a sharpness to his movements that makes him _lethal_.  He’s a predator on this table, and Roy’s a practiced hand, and the game is shorter than Ed and almost as devastating as his trademark triumphant grin.

“That was okay,” he says, lifting his Solo cup and seeming surprised to find that it’s empty—which Roy noticed ten minutes ago, casting a glance into the bottom when Ed left it balanced on a corner to line up a shot.  Ed frowns, tosses it into the nearest wastebasket, and shoves his hands into his pockets.  “Maybe if anybody worth playing shows up—” Their trounced opponents scowl.  “—we should try and take ’em.”

_We,_ Roy thinks.  _We, us._

There is no being on this planet or any life-supporting globe in a thousand universes half so pathetic as Roy Mustang.

“Yeah,” he says, in keeping with his recent tendencies towards stunning oration.

Ed plants both hands on the small of his back and stretches, and Roy’s mouth goes dry.  “I think I’m gonna get some air or somethin’.”  He wobbles slightly as he straightens, and—sure, this’ll sound _stupid_ , but it’s not like that’s a surprise at this point—

“How much have you _had_?” Roy asks.  He’s not entirely sure he’s prepared for the answer; Ed seems to hold it better than he expected, but all the same…

That grin could level civilizations.  “Not as much as I wanted, believe me.”  He starts off towards the nearest set of sliding glass doors at what can only be called a saunter.  “You comin’?”

To the remotest reaches of the continents; to the furthest depths of hell—Roy will trail him like a lonely dog and never ask for so much as a scrap to feed on.

It is becoming evident, with a sinking sort of clarity, that this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

“Sure,” he says.  He slips past to open the door for Ed, although sliding ones leave something to be desired in the chivalric gesture department.  “Watch your step, okay?”

Ed moves past him—moves _close_ , much too close, much closer than necessary—and starts down the half-flight of stairs towards some extraordinarily well-trimmed hedges.

“You’re kinda cute when you get all protective,” he says.

Roy’s body freezes with his arm still extended to slide the door shut behind them.  “I,” his voice says.

No matter where he searches, he can’t seem to find the rest of the sentence that was meant to follow that subject.

After a long moment, he coughs up a: “…what?”

Ed looks back over one shoulder, and his eyes _gleam_ , and he is an _apocalypse_ in the shape of a great-assed boy.

“You’re kinda cute all the time,” he says.

Ed’s drunk.

Roy’s dreaming.

Maybe both.

What the _fuck_?

He doesn’t have a choice.  There’s no _decision_ to be made; there’s nothing conscious about it; there’s no _dilemma_ ; there are no _options_.  He follows Ed.  He couldn’t possibly do anything else—not with a thousand armies laid out before him or the hounds of hell at his heels.  He’s bound up in the air Ed breathes out; he’s sewn into the space behind that lithe body and its wicked grin and its glittering _eyes_ —

The cut of the tux pants is so goddamn flattering that there’s a pretty real dehydration risk from the way Roy’s mouth is watering.  Ed, drifting through streams of moonlight and the starker cast of the artfully-angled floodlights on the lawn—Ed, lifting one hand out of his pocket to set it on the edge of a fountain, rising to his tiptoes, peering at the mechanisms—Ed, wandering on and out across the dewy grass towards some stupid little glass-walled gazebo thing that probably cost more than a _year’s_ worth of rent—

And Roy, trailing like a hopeless shadow.

“Hey,” Ed says, stepping up into stupid-gazebo-thing and turning in a slow circle, gazing up.  “You ever seen ‘The Sound of Music’?”

Roy leans against the side of the doorway with his heart and his tongue competing as to which can knot itself up tighter.  He has to be clever; he _has_ to be.  It’s all he has left.  Ed owns the rest, and he is crumpling inward.  “So which of us is the girl, and which of us is the Nazi kid?”

Ed snorts, which is weirdly almost attractive, and beams at him, which—

Just—

To hell with it.  To hell and _back_ with _all_ of it; it can choke on sulfur and burn to ash; he doesn’t _care_ ; he’s never wanted _anything_ as much as he wants _this_ , and he doesn’t give a _shit_ what he stands to lose—

His stupid little heart is on a stupid little bungee cord snapping back after a stretch, and he is _fucked_ , and he is crossing the stupid marble tile floor that must’ve cost a _fortune_ , but there’s no price anyone could set on raising both hands to Ed’s elbows and leaning in and—

—kissing him.

Oh, _God_.

He tastes like snickerdoodle and cinnamon and pure heat and, weirdly, not like cheap beer—

There are too many lights bursting on the insides of Roy’s eyelids for him to remember which way’s up, let alone how logic functions; his left hand ignores the fluttering swarm of inhibitions and tangles itself into Ed’s glorious ponytail and tugs gently, tilting his face up and a little to the side to fit their mouths together _closer_ —

And Ed’s kissing him _back_.

He must be really damn drunk to be so suggestible; this is the worst idea Roy’s ever had; how can he _be_ this—fucking—douchey, perverted, whatever—

Except Ed fists both hands in the front of Roy’s shirt and hauls downward; he has no idea what the hell he’s doing—he’s all close-mouthed enthusiasm and tightening hands—but he’s _liking_ it.

Roy—shouldn’t.

He _shouldn’t_.

He shouldn’t cup his right hand under Ed’s jaw and coax Ed’s lips open and sweep his tongue against the roof of Ed’s mouth and drink in his faint squeak like it’s the elixir of fucking _life_.

He shouldn’t teach the most brilliant kid he’s ever met how to tangle your tongue with somebody else’s and drive them _insane_ ; he shouldn’t suck on Ed’s lower lip and _revel_ in the gasp—

He shouldn’t—

He _can’t_ —

He has to—

He’s _not_ —

He’s better than this; he has to be better than this; Ed _deserves_ better than this—

Who the fuck does he think he is?

He disentangles his hand from Ed’s hair and staggers away, and the back of his other hand rises to press itself against his mouth, and every nerve in his _body_ is on fire, and Ed’s eyelashes flick up.  His mouth is swollen and wet and _dark_ red, and his eyes start out hazy and then focus like laser sights with Roy in the crosshairs, and—

And what the fuck is he supposed to say?  _I know you’re drunk and it’s not fair, but you’re so hot I can’t even look at you sometimes_ —

“I'm sorry,” he hears his voice croak out.  “I didn't—mean it.”

In the span of three seconds, Ed is three different people—a freshly-kissed high-school kid, first; flushed and dazed and bewilderedly smiling.  Then—just for half a breath, half a _heartbeat_ —he’s decimated.

Then he’s the embodiment of absolute rage.

“What the fuck do you mean, you didn’t _mean_ it?” he asks.

He takes a step forward; Roy stumbles back under the sheer force of the radiating vitriol.  “I—”

“ _Well_?” Ed says, teeth bared, eyes too bright— “What the fuck am I, some fucking—Katy Perry shit?  Are you _experimenting_?  Only no fucking _homo_ , and no strings attached, and it’s _okay_ , ’cause I'm _drunk_ , right?”

_No,_ Roy thinks so hard it jitters in his throat and turns to jagged stone.  “Ed—”

“Fuck _you_ ,” Ed snarls, and there’s an edge underneath it—a rough edge, a raw edge.  Hurt.  Roy’s either going to throw up or drop dead, and either way, it’s more than he merits, isn’t it?  “You think I’m a fucking idiot?  I live with a _cop_ , remember?  I’m not _stupid_ ; I had maybe three fucking sips and poured the rest out in plants and shit—how fucking—” His voice catches, but he just barrels through it like he didn't hear.  “How fucking _dare_ you—”

“Wait,” Roy says.  “Ed, listen t—”

“Y’know,” Ed says, and his voice is _scathing_ now, “ _nah_.  I’m good.  I don’t give a single goddamn fuck about anything you have to say.  Fuck yourself, Mustang.  _Fuck_ yourself.”

This is so wrong Roy can’t make words come, can’t make his thoughts stop spinning around the dizzy axis of _Wait wait stop_ so fast the whole damn carousel’s a blur.

“Ed,” he forces out, “ _please_ —”

Funny, how time works.  One second, he was on cloud nine tasting nectar on his idol’s tongue; the next he was falling all the way to Earth.

One second, he’s reaching for Ed’s arm; the next, he’s sprawled on marble tile with what feels like imprints of Ed’s palms on his chest from the force of the shove.

He should get up—

Run after Ed, say something, _scream_ something—

But it feels like his chest is caving in—

How’s Ed even going to get home?

He’s going to hate Roy forever.

Is he going to _walk_ , or what?  Surely he can call a cab.  Surely there’s someone who will come and get him.  Surely—

What’s _happening_ to him?  He has to pick himself back up and dust his dumb ass off and keep _going_.  His firm belief that he’s capable of dragging himself back upright a grand total of one more time than the world is planning to kick him down is the only philosophy that’s helped him make it this far.  He owes it to himself.  He has to scrounge up a little more resolution from… somewhere.  He has to get through this.  He _will_.

He’ll be okay.

Somehow, he’ll be okay.

Humanity is resilient, and cardiac muscle is tough and elastic, and he’ll figure it out somehow.

He has to.

He counts down thirty even seconds in his head, and then he hauls himself up to his feet and goes to look for Andie.  He needs to make sure she gets home okay.  He promised it to her.

  


* * *

  


He should have known.

He should have _known_.

Ed’s not fucking stupid, and this is always how it works—when he goes for something that he wants, the whole fucking thing blows up in his face.  It’s a universal law, cozied up right next to gravity and entropy and conservation of matter.  He has to learn to accept the fucking reality.  He has to learn how to kill the stupid, _stupid_ urge to hope.

What it boils down to is that the only things you can trust are numbers and facts.  People are out.  People will twist you up and fuck you over just for the _fun_ of it.  People are shitty.  People are poison.

…well, like, ninety-nine-point-six-eight percent of people, excepting everybody on Ed’s speed-dial.

“Is there internal bleeding?” Izumi asks a split-second after the line picks up.

“Uh,” Ed says.  “No?”

“Compound fractures?”

“…no?”

“Virulent experimental virus strain escaping and running amok?”

“…no.”

“Anything life-or-death at all?”

“Well—no.”

Izumi sighs feelingly.  “Ed, do you know what time it is?”

He holds the phone away from his ear for a second to glance at it. “Eleven-forty-eight.”

“Where the hell are you, and what do you need, hon?”

“Dumb party,” he says.  “And I need a ride.”  He pauses.  “…please?”

“ _Kids_ these days,” Izumi says, which means _yes_.

  


* * *

  


Al is slightly mesmerized by the way that Alfons stirs his cereal with the spoon while he frowns at the newspaper headlines.  First of all, it’s probably possible to enumerate all of the human beings in the whole world who still sit down and read print newspapers on one hand; second, Honey-Nut Cheerios do not benefit in any way from being redistributed in the milk.  It’s probably a detriment, in fact; most likely they go soggy faster this way, but this peculiarly idiosyncratic manifestation of distraction is just…

Charming.  It’s charming.  Alfons is charming.

Al is going to have to stay away from Winry for a long, long, long time, isn’t he?

Not nearly so charming is the arrhythmic elephantine thudding that heralds a thoroughly groggy and profoundly bedheaded Ed’s descent of the stairs and the ensuing shuffle into the kitchen.  He collapses into an empty chair, blinks twice from deep within the well of frizzy gold hair around his face, and then lays said face down on the tabletop.

“Are you hungover?” Alfons asks in no small amount of horror.

“No,” Ed says into the placemat.  “Jus’ couldn’t sleep for shit.”

Ed is a professional grade sleeper—he can get a whole night’s energy out of a cat nap or pass out so entirely that a parade with three off-key brass bands and several peacocks couldn’t make him stir, depending on what the occasion calls for or allows.  He has a singular ability to collude with his own body to trade midnight-oil-burning inspiration for actual rest, and then to turn around and drop to the mattress and instantly become less responsive than the average log.

The only times he _really_ can’t sleep are when he’s either miserably sad or ferociously angry.

Al doesn’t think he likes where this is going.

“What happened last night?” he asks.  He almost fears the answer—but for the fact that you can read Ed like a weathervane.  If something truly terrible had happened, he wouldn’t be sulking; he’d be _quiet_ , and his hands would be shaking, and his eyes would be glazed.  He’d be a quiet wreck trembling towards a full-on breakdown, and it would take everything he had to hold himself together; he wouldn’t waste time with theatrics.

“Eugh,” Ed says into the table.  Al wants to point at him and raise both eyebrows at Alfons over the back of Ed’s head— _There, that’s a noise of mild distress, not unmanageable pain.  He’ll be all right.  We can get him through this._

“Eggo?” Al asks.

“Thanks,” Ed says.

Al rummages in the freezer for a couple blueberry ones, since they’re Ed’s favorite.  Ed seems to subconsciously register gestures like that.  Gracia would probably spoil them all a little more rotten by making them bacon and eggs and whatnot, but she and Mr. Hughes took Elysia out for a walk around the block in her stroller, and they’re planning to stop at the grocery store on their way back.  All the same, Al cranes his neck to double-check the living room as he pops Ed’s breakfast into the toaster oven.  Looks like the coast is clear.

“So?” he says.

“Mustang,” Ed mumbles.

Alfons’s face is a priceless and indescribable mixture of surprise, dismay, and disbelief.  “What about him?”

“He drove us over and taught me how to play pool and kept asking how much I’d been drinking,” Ed says without lifting his head, “and I figgered—like, maybe that was ’cause he actually _gave_ a shit, right?”

This is not a promising start to a story.

“Right,” Al says slowly.  “But…?”

Matted hair gleams as Ed raises his head two inches from the tabletop, the better to bang his forehead down on it and make a nice dull sound.  “But _apparently_ he was just fucking buttering me up ’cause he thought I was wasted and wanted to make out and cop a fucking feel and see what it felt like to fuck around with a dude, and then once he’d tried my shit on, he decided he ‘didn’t _mean_ it’.”

A small but extremely bright bulb flicks on in the deepest sanctuary of Al’s soul.  The tungsten hums softly, and the glass pings.  There is a placard underneath.  In plain block type, it reads, _Roy Mustang is a dead man_.

“I guess it’s my own fucking fault,” Ed says, and somewhere else in the existential labyrinth of Al’s emotions, beautiful things are shattering, and shards rain to the floor.

Seeing Ed this way— _Ed_ , stupid, stubborn, sweet, wonderful _Ed_ , who cares so much and works so hard and loves _living_ but doesn’t have the slightest idea how to go about it because there isn’t a cunning bone in his body—is agonizing.  Al wants things to go right for him.  Al wants him to be happy.  Al wants him to understand how—gosh, how _magnificent_ he is, despite all the quirks and foibles; _because_ of them.  But this is what always happens when life creeps up behind Edward Elric and tries to garrote him—he blames himself.

“I mean,” Ed is saying as the no-longer-nearly-so-appetizing smell of Eggo waffles drifts through the silent air, “I just… I thought maybe he just… wouldn’t… be… a dick.”  He dredges his hands up from his hoodie pocket to rub his face with them.  “More fucking fool I or whatever, I guess.”

Al opens his mouth to say _It’s not your fault_ , or _Don’t think about it like that_ , or _There must be guys out there who will cherish and appreciate your exquisite talents as well as your problematically attractive exterior, and surely one of them will find you someday and make you feel as loved and lovely as you are_.

But Alfons is faster.

And less devotedly fraternal.

“Still a better love story than ‘Twilight’,” Alfons says.

Al is about to snatch the newspaper away and beat him with it, except that Ed lifts his head a few inches from the tabletop and wrings out an echo of a laugh.

“Fucking fantastic,” he says.  “My life amounts to a fucking old-ass meme.”

“It’s not that old,” Alfons says.  “And at least you _got_ some action.”

Al pats Ed’s shoulder very gently.  “So what are you going to do?” he asks, which is more socially acceptable than what he wants to say, which is _When would you like the poison to kick in and kill him?_

“Make him wish he _had_ meant it,” Ed says instantly.  “Isn’t that the best revenge?”

Al can think of better.

But he’ll let Ed try to handle this first.

“I dunno,” Alfons is saying.  “How about laxatives in his Gatorade?  Or Google-stalking him until you find an embarrassing middle school picture?  Or soap-painting something subversive on the windows of his car?  Or—”

“Sweet Jesus,” Ed says.  “Have I ever told you how glad I am that you’re on my side?”

Alfons’s smile is almost _surprised_ , like praise is a foreign language he’s trying to be conversational in but doesn’t entirely understand, and Al’s starting to think…

Al’s starting to think maybe they can make this a good year if they really fight for it—all three of them together, with a single goal in mind.  Maybe they can take down anything that gets in their way.  Maybe—

“What’s that smell?” Alfons asks.

“Shitfuck _damn_ ,” Al says, already scrambling for the toaster oven.  “The _waffles_ —”

Ed actually falls out of his chair at the expletive, but Alfons correctly interprets the frantic gesture and climbs a chair to disable the fire alarm, and then Ed recovers enough to start opening windows, and…

Well…

The whole indomitable resolve thing is a work in progress.


End file.
